Josh Hartnett’s New Netflix Hit Is No Widow’s Bay, but It Is a Lot of Fun

Television Below Feels Like One Big Screech-In Netflix’s new supernatural thriller, starring Josh Hartnett, is no Widow’s Bay, but it is a lot of fun. By Enter your email to receive alerts for this author. Sign in or create an account to better manage your email preferences. Unsubscribe from email alerts Are you sure you want to unsubscribe from email alerts for Rebecca Onion? Oct 10, 202611:00 AM Netflix Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Netflix’s new No. 1 show, Below, starts with a banger of an image: A family of Newfoundlanders, in the process of moving from their remote village to the bigger town of Snook’s Arm, sits morosely in a small boat that’s towing their house across open water. This is a scene from history—in the 1960s, the Canadian government paid Newfoundlanders living far out to move closer in, to make services easier to provide, and there are pictures of houses being towed in this way. But in Below, there’s a problem: Something rises from the deep, the family’s father is trapped in the house, the house is going down, and Calvin Penney, the son who must cut the tow rope holding the house to the boat, will grow up haunted by the giant eye he saw in the water as his dad was sinking. Calvin is played as an anxious, frustrated dead-ender by Josh Hartnett in this six-episode miniseries, touted as a supernatural thriller but with much more action in its bones. In the present day, Penney and his youngest son Wade—a manic presence on an ATV, played by Stranger Things’ Charlie Heaton—still live in Snook’s Arm, where the residents debate whether to resettle further to an even bigger town, and Penney fishes for icebergs to sell to the local vodka distillery. Penney’s not happy about any of it—the moratorium on cod fishing has left him without the job he grew up thinking he’d have, and the town is clinging on by its fingernails, full of discord. When Penney brings in an iceberg and the buyer from the distillery rejects it as impure, he asks a scientist friend (Mackenzie Davis) to retest it, and the scientist finds something odd. From here, Below unfolds, part climate fiction, part creature feature, part family story, as Penney’s other two kids return home to visit and the whole gang tries to figure out what’s happening in the water. The best thing Below has to offer, peace to the actor we used to call “Josh Hotnett,” is its location. The cast includes actors from Newfoundland and Labrador, and “Snook’s Arm” is actually a town in Newfoundland called Brigus South. The people on the subreddit r/newfoundland say that the accents on the show are passable—though Hartnett’s least so, and some of them apparently sound “too Irish.” (Many Irish people settled in Newfoundland starting in the 18th century, and the accents are cousins.) I was relieved to find that Reddit thread, because to a casual watcher with zero experience of Newfoundland beyond watching @harbourcustoms on TikTok, the accents were so fun. The unaccustomed (most viewers) will have to use subtitles. Everyone is a “b’y” (boy). Things are described as “best kind” (great). “Jesus friggin’ Murphy,” Hartnett swears. “How you feeling?” one character asks another. “Oh, you know, like a smacked arse,” the second replies. “I t’ought I was having a spell of the ol’ hag,” a character says, describing sleep paralysis. Apparently, in Newfoundland, getting “screeched in“(a ceremony represented in this show as kissing a dead fish and taking a shot) is for tourists. This whole show feels like one big screech-in, and I loved it. Below has been getting the Widow’s Bay comparison in headlines and tweets. I have to say, if they didn’t each take place on coastlines and involve obscure threats to small communities and beleaguered fathers trying to protect their sons, and if Widow’s Bay hadn’t just taken home a gazillion Emmys, this probably wouldn’t be happening. Widow’s Bay is singular. Every character, every line, and every prop is confident in its need to be there and only there. And Matthew Rhys’ performance as the embattled patriarch at the center of events is sublimely comedic, in a way that Hartnett’s more standard-issue Calvin just isn’t. In every aspect, Below is much more tied to the conventions of its genre: the evil billionaires, the preposterously beautiful scientist pleading for the beast to be studied instead of killed, the hero running toward the shore warning everyone out of the water. And, as the story develops, the series can feel choppy. A promising plotline involving an infection spread by the ingestion of a type of mucus left behind by the beast gets resolved too quickly. Mostly, I just wanted to see way more of the abandoned village Calvin discovers, full of people who refused removal. Although the show’s creators swear they aren’t considering whether or not Below could get a second season, we know by now that “limited series” are only limited until they get renewed. (Matthew Rhys at the scene of the crime again!) The end of Below’s last episode is full of open questions, so I’ve got my suspicions. If Netflix wants to return to Newfoundland, there’s lots more to do, b’ys—and there might be plenty of appetite for it. Canada Netflix TV Thrillers