Stephen King Has Given His Verdict On Two Of Apple TV's Best 2026 Shows

Stephen King is a wildly prolific writer and an even more wildly prolific reader (if you see him in his seat at Fenway Park, he's usually reading a book while the Red Sox play), so I have no idea how he finds the time to keep up with movies and TV shows to boot. Somehow, though, he pulls it off, and when the spirit moves him, King is not shy about sharing his opinions. Sometimes, he comes flying off the top rope out of nowhere, like when he randomly panned Adam Sandler and Jack Nicholson for their work in "Anger Management." Meanwhile, he had nothing but praise for Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill's horror film "The Black Phone."

King should be in a good mood nowadays because his wheelhouse genre, horror, is both dominating multiplexes and performing quite well on television. As such, there's a wealth of good to great creepy stuff out there, and, if you follow King on social media, you know he's been opining about what turns him on or cheeses him off.

Recently, he took to Threads to love up two of the buzziest series on television: "Widow's Bay" and "Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed." The former is a horror comedy series set in a charming little island town that is, quite unfortunately, cursed. The latter is a comedy thriller starring the great Tatiana Maslany as a divorced mother who, while fighting for custody of her daughter, gets caught up in the investigation of a webcam boy's murder.

King digs both shows, but there's only one that he considers worthy of Alfred Hitchcock.

As Stephen King wrote on Threads, "'Widow's Bay' is good. 'Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed' is even better. It's like Hitchcock came back to do it one more time. And Tatiana Maslany is so good. The play of emotions on her face is pretty incredible. She goes from comic to terror in an instant."

That is high praise indeed. The series, created by David J. Rosen, hurls a lot of narrative curveballs at the viewer, which would probably please the master of suspense ... except Alfred Hitchcock never wrote a female protagonist with as much agency and strength as Maslany's Paula Saunders. It's just another in a string of stellar performances that leaves you confident that Maslany will one day be accepting an Oscar for Best Actress.

Created by Katie Dippold, "Widow's Bay" is very cheerfully a horror comedy show, and it's got a murderer's row cast that includes Matthew Rhys, Kate O'Flynn, Kevin Carroll, Dale Dickey, and scene-stealer supreme Stephen Root. It comes on as a monster-of-the-week series, but it winds up heading in different directions. I'd love to hear King go into more depth about what he loves about the show, but he's got books to read and write, along with even more media to consume. We'll have to settle for a handful of sentences.