#101: Apple TV is random, but Widow's Bay is great
Unfortunately, this email does also contain more niche travel complaints
Death by Consumption
5/5/26 - 5/11/26
My month of travel has come to a conclusion, and it went out with a doozy. Bear with me: this week there will be more travel complaints. But then it’s over! I’ve returned to my beloved NYC, where the weather is unstable and the pollen dust is an inch thick. I have so much culture to catch up on! I have 200 episodes of Bravo shows, an entire season of The Comeback, and somehow there are TWO gay Anne Hathaway movies out right now??? I’m overwhelmed, but nevertheless I will persist. Someone has to!
This week: I love Apple TV’s new show, I have finally turned against Glen Powell, and I experienced mayhem on an airplane.
Widow’s Bay, season 1 episodes 1-3 — on Apple TV
My only complaint with Widow’s Bay is that it’s coming out at the start of summer, when it is clearly an autumn show. I’m not in a chilly, spooky mood right now, and I suspect I’d love the show even more if I were able to watch it in early-evening darkness, snug under a blanket. But that’s a minor issue, because I have no other complaints about the show — I love it! The end!
Set on the fictional New England island of Widow’s Bay, where mysterious and evil things have been happening for generations but which is now becoming a tourist destination, Matthew Rhys plays the mayor trying to keep things together. In tone and structure, it’s most similar to the X-Files, swinging effortlessly between comedy and horror and doing both equally well (though I will admit it took me about an episode and a half to really settle into the show’s comedic tone). Similar to LOST, there’s an overriding mystery (which is literally the same mystery as LOST: what’s happening on this island??), but with The X-Files’ episodic “villains of the week.” So far we’ve already had evil fog, a killer clown, and a terrifyingly horny sea hag. And through it all we’ve got Matthew Rhys as both Mulder and Scully in one very handsome Welshman.
Apple TV always feels so random and almost all their shows are very… normie (sorry to my dear friend reading this who works there!). Like, when was the last time someone wanted to talk about an Apple TV show with you? Sure, there were those couple years when I had to endure people telling me how I need to watch Ted Lasso — even though every time I asked, “Is it funny?” they’d reply, “… It’s sweet!” — but even that tide has mercifully receded. So Widow’s Bay feels like their first genuinely weird and unique show. Much like the X-Files, I’m not sure I care that much about the central mystery, and I’m much more enjoying the weekly hijinks, but I’m very interested to see how this show develops, which is not something I’ve ever said about an Apple show. It’s so nice when our corporate rulers surprise us!
The Running Man (2025) — on Delta
This feels like it was made to watch on a plane. There’s really no reason for a movie this dumb to be this long, but on a plane that becomes a strength, as it ate up nearly half the time between LA and New York, and I could doze through it and still follow the general plot. Glen Powell’s people have really been working overtime to make him into The Guy We All Love, and though I’ll admit I’ve been charmed by him in the past, this is the first movie I’ve seen where he feels like he’s going down a highly unpleasant Ryan Reynolds route. There’s a smugness now to his onscreen persona, an exhausting, constant wink to the audience that’s like, “Can you believe someone with abs and arms like this is also goofy?” that I find nauseating. Sure, it was fun seeing Glen’s ass for a second in this movie, but that’s IT.
Wagyu filet mignon, before the chaos started — in the Delta One lounge
Traveling in America is a nightmare. We all know this. It’s always been mediocre at best, but in a post-DOGE world, stories about the misery of domestic air travel are a dime a dozen. And yet, attempting to get home from LA this weekend was one of the most frustrating and genuinely baffling travel disasters I’ve ever experienced. Bear with me as I tell you the tale of a surreal series of events that took me from the highs of travel to the absolute lows, and resulted in a near-mutiny against our plane’s pilot.
It started out fairly typical: flight is delayed 3 hours, something about mechanical issues, blah blah blah. Then it was 4 hours, then it was 5, as our original plane was swapped out for a new one in New York, before coming to LA. As the afternoon dragged on, most of our plane’s passengers hopped to other flights, which meant I continuously got bumped up the upgrade list, until, suddenly, I was upgraded to Delta One for the first time in my life. Picturing the gorgeous lie-flat seat that was now in my grasp, I remained complacent, and didn’t search for an alternative flight like everyone else. This would prove to be a terrible decision.
Meanwhile, the delays kept mounting — our new plane had arrived at LAX, but was suddenly having engine problems. I don’t know a lot about planes, but I think engines are probably one of the worst parts of the plane to have problems on! And yet, due to my upgrade, I now had access to the Delta One Lounge. So, once again, while the smarter people found alternative flights home, I was happily in one of the nicest lounges I had ever been in — as place that’s like if heaven was real and only for rich people and mid-century modern for some reason. As our flight was delayed yet again, pushing us 7 hours past our original departure time, I ordered a wagyu filet mignon. “Why not take the wine into the massage chair?” I heard a waitress ask another person in the lounge behind me, and I, too, wondered: why not take the wine into the massage chair??
My lounge bliss was cut short by the announcement that our plane’s engine problems were too disastrous to fly, so a new plane had been found, and we would begin boarding soon. I said goodbye to the gorgeous Delta One lounge, boarded the new plane, and in that time my colleague Jenny had also gotten an upgrade to Delta One — in fact, practically the entire plane had been upgraded, since most of the people who had actually paid for good seats had seen the writing on the wall and gotten the hell out of dodge, leaving us peasants to enjoy their crumbs. The meek shall inherit the upgrades!
The first class seats were practically full of first-timers like me, so people were marveling at the perks like the chimpanzees at the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey. A girl with braces was in the seat next to me, taking pictures of the menu, while I tried my best to look like the kind of person so used to lie-flat seats that he doesn’t even realize there are other types of seats on a plane. I desperately hoped anyone who had paid for first class didn’t lump me in with this gauche little girl. Sure, I was taking pictures of my lux surroundings as well, but I wasn’t being so obvious about it.
We pulled back from the gate, began taxiing, and then… stopped. The head flight attendant — a brassy young gal named Hayley who I would soon learn had an attitude that tells me she’s absolutely from Philly — got on the phone with IT and I heard her inform them that her screen that controlled “everything” had broken. They tried to troubleshoot over the phone for an agonizing 30 minutes, before dragging us back to the gate so maintenance could get on board. This is when a portal to Hell opened inside our plane.
Several passengers jump up into the aisles and demand to be let off the plane immediately, terrified it would crash upon takeoff. The pilot himself comes out to reassure everyone that the plane is completely fine, that it was just the flight attendants’ system that was buggy, but that didn’t placate anyone — perhaps, like me, they were remembering the beginning of Final Destination, when the overhead lights not working is a sign that the plane is going to crash. Flight attendant Hayley also doesn’t help things by undermining the pilot and saying that, yes, it is the flight attendants’ system that is buggy, but that system also controls the smoke detectors and emergency slides. “So it is kind of important,” she says. That’s really not helping, Hayley!!!
Making things worse, one passenger has let his dog out onto the seat next to him, and when Hayley asks him if it is a service animal, he tells her it is one, adding, “My girlfriend works for Delta.” As if having a girlfriend who works for Delta means you can do whatever you want on a plane? Hayley, in the midst of all this absolute chaos, takes the time to search the internal system to see if the dog is, in fact, a service animal — my messy queen!!! Of course the guy was lying, and Hayley informs him she’ll be reporting him, to ruin his future ability to use his girlfriend’s Delta privileges.
Hayley, chaos incarnate herself, is so incensed about this guy lying to her that — while we are in our 9th hour of delays, on a broken-down plane full of people in the aisles erupting into mass revolt — she goes into the cockpit to complain about the dog guy to the pilots. Hayley, what are you doing! Next to my colleague Jenny, an absolutely gorgeous woman starts sobbing at the idea that she won’t see her kids on Mother’s Day. The situation is degenerating quickly.
The pilot, seeing things spiraling out of control, gets on the intercom to announce once again that the plane is completely safe to fly, that maintenance is fixing the flight attendants’ system, and that everything is fine except for one liiiiiiittle problem: if we don’t leave in 40 minutes, he will time out, and we’ll be left without a pilot. A gate agent finally opens the plane’s door, and half the passengers rush off. Hayley takes this opportunity to tell the gate agent about the dog guy, loudly, so that dog guy can hear her complaining about him. Her priority throughout all of this remains getting revenge on a passenger for lying to her, and I have to respect it.
A little while later, there is an announcement: the system is fixed! Just some light paperwork to be done, no more than 20 minutes, with plenty of time to get off the ground before we lose our pilot. The few of us left on this now-barren flight burst into applause. The gorgeous woman sobbing next to Jenny begins smiling and laughing, relieved she’ll get to see her kids. 20 minutes come and go with no updates, and then another 20 minutes. By my count, the pilot has already timed out, and yet no one is saying anything. It is now 11pm and we were supposed to leave 10 hours ago.
A man in first class decides the best way he can help the situation is to stand up and start screaming. Meanwhile, a woman in first class, wine-drunk and deeply annoying, keeps announcing to the entire plane that “someone on this plane is not meant to go to New York, and we need to all figure out who that is! Something is preventing them from traveling!” She either genuinely believes this to be true, or believes this to be such a hilarious joke that she announces this at least three times.
The pilot comes out, and the first class man who is screaming gets inches from the pilot’s face, yelling about how long we had been sitting with no updates. I’ve never seen a person actually yell at a pilot before! The pilot now has to spend a precious 5-10 minutes in one-on-one conversation with this man, placating him, before he can get back to his important pilot problem-solving. At one point, the annoying woman interrupts to inform the pilot about her theory that “something” is preventing someone on this plane from getting to New York. He calmly nods and pretends to take this in as valuable advice, using all his decades of pilot training to keep a straight face. At this point, I start becoming convinced that this woman is the one who isn’t meant to go to New York — if nothing else, it can’t hurt the rest of us to throw her off the plane, can it?
Hayley, meanwhile, has told some of us that, yes, the pilot is timing out, but that “he can push it,” so it seems that we will be finally leaving — we are now 10 hours past departure time, and we’ve already been on this plane for 3 hours. The mechanics leave, the pilot gets into the cockpit, we all settle in, and then… nothing happens. More conversations between flight attendants and the pilot, who I’m pretty sure I hear say, “Are you fucking kidding me?” And then I am sure I do hear him say, “Snacks???” My heart sinks. Why is our pilot in an argument about snacks right now? The woman next to Jenny, who was sobbing about her kids, and then started laughing when they announced we were leaving, is now sobbing again.
After a few minutes of tense discussion, the pilot makes another announcement: the food on the plane has been sitting out for 5 hours, and is no longer safe to eat. So we’re going to take a vote — before he can even finish speaking, the entire plane has voted to just go. We don’t need to eat! I’ve never in my life seen a pilot making a plane take a vote, but I’m inspired by the speed with which we all came together. This is like an episode of an Aaron Sorkin show — Americans all putting aside their differences and coming together for the greater good! So, once again, we’re about to take off. Everything is fine. We’re going home! I can hear the triumphant music swelling.
Nope. More panic and intense conversations in the cockpit. I can hear the pilot, who for the first time is actually angry, now yelling at flight attendant Hayley. “You need to get your people together,” he yells, and she says something back at him, and I’m wondering just how bad things have to get on an airplane before your flight attendants and pilots start fighting. The pilot shamefully comes out for yet another announcement, informing us that there is actually a clause, buried deep in flight attendants’ contracts, that states that they must have meals on flights this long. So now people have been dispatched to find meals for the flight attendants in the airport. And, he informs us, he is in his final 20 minutes — if we’re not in the air in 20 minutes, he can’t fly the plane, and the flight is canceled. Even worse, it’s now 11:30 pm, so nothing is open in the airport, so no one knows where the flight attendants will get meals from. “The gravest mistake I ever made,” the pilot informs us in his serious pilot voice, “Was getting myself a hamburger earlier and not getting meals for the flight attendants.” I feel as if I am trapped in an off-Broadway play. Why is there a pilot telling me a tragic story about a hamburger right now?
People start pulling granola bars out of handbags, offering them to the pilot, who, absurdly, has to say things like, “Granola bars are not meals,” still in his serious pilot voice. After 5 agonizing minutes, a gate agent sprints onto the plane carrying trays of something, and we briefly celebrate, before learning that whatever those trays were, they also do not count as meals. We are confused and asking many questions, the kinds of questions we never thought we needed to ask on a plane before: what does constitute a meal, legally? Can flight attendants sign something that temporarily waives one part of their contract? We are lost in the murky depths of flight attendant contract law, when we should all be home in our beds.
It gradually becomes clear, but unspoken, that at least one flight attendant has deliberately triggered the meal clause of their contract, refusing to work while hungry. Relatable! I choose to blame the obnoxious passengers — namely the dog guy, the first class screaming man, and the annoying first class woo-woo woman — for being so goddamned irritating that at least one flight attendant has finally thrown up their hands and said, “Fuck you, I’m canceling your flight out of spite.” Which is also very relatable!
Miraculously, though, meals are procured from somewhere, with a mere 7 minutes left before the pilot times out. In the most dramatic point of an already dramatic night, the pilot announces, “I’m going for it,” before sprinting up the aisle and going into the cockpit. We have now gone from off-Broadway to a full-blown blockbuster, the pilot slapping the cap back on his head before taking the wheel and tearing down the runway as the clock ticks down to 0. I am exhausted and thoroughly beaten down, and yet I have also never felt more alive.
Two minutes later, he comes out of the cockpit, hat in hand, clearly having realized that maybe it’s not the best idea to rush takeoff on a plane that has been having mechanical issues for the past several hours. He tells us that he’s done all he can do, and the flight is now canceled. It’s past midnight, and we have been delayed for 11 hours, with the last 4 of those hours trapped on the plane, surrounded by chaos. We all shuffle out into the airport clutching our things, miserable.
You know the drill after that: more chaos in the airport, long lines, rebooking, assholes yelling at employees about hotel vouchers, etc. The next day, I got out on an earlier flight, while my dear colleague Jenny was stranded for an unbelievable 2nd day of endless delays, ultimately only getting home in the early hours of Monday morning. (Jenny doesn’t have a Substack — YET — so you will be missing out on the thrilling part 2 to this travel drama. I’m so sorry!) It was an absolutely absurd end to a very long work trip, and I don’t know if it is actually his fault, but I blame MTV’s Sean Duffy, who is too busy filming a reality show to bother running our country’s infrastructure. Everything is crumbling! The good news? Delta gave us $12 meal vouchers for our trouble :)