In early December of 2024, Greg Chiodo, the location manager for what would become the hit Emmy-winning Apple TV series Widow’s Bay, piled into a van with the show’s creator, directors, and producers, and set off for Bearskin Neck in Rockport. Creator and showrunner Katie Dippold had spent years as a writer on Parks and Recreation and wrote the 2013 action comedy The Heat. director Hiro Murai had previously directed episodes of Atlanta, Station Eleven, and Mr. & Mrs. Smith. And Chiodo himself had helped producers find the perfect Massachusetts shooting locations for movies like Shutter Island, The Town, Black Mass, and Knives Out. But on that December day, the group was “just a bunch of folks on an adult field trip,” says Chiodo, a Detroit native who now lives in Beverly.
“I almost envisioned it like we had this map in our head,” he says. “You go out, and it’s not so much zeroing in on something. It’s more: If this was the town center, or the pier where the ferries would arrive, you’re thinking about, how do we make the rest of this work, or how do we connect this location to the lighthouse?” Much of the series, which took home 14 Emmys in September, including the award for Outstanding Comedy Series, ended up being shot in Gloucester and Rockport, with additional locations including Maynard, Worcester, and Sudbury, as well as sets at New England Studios in Devens. “The trick was creating a cohesive fictional town and island using locations in different parts of Massachusetts,” says Meg Montagnino-Jarrett, director of the Massachusetts Film Office. “Cape Ann gave us the coastal setting, and because sets were also being built at New England Studios in Devens, we extended our search into Central Massachusetts. We found locations in nearby communities that provided the town hall, inn and local gathering places we needed. The end result was a place with some recognizable spots, but one that was not meant to represent any single community.”
Christian Sprenger, who won the Emmy Award for Outstanding Cinematography for his work on Widow’s Bay, says that Cape Ann “photographs beautifully from any angle,” but what made the area work so well for the show was the “grounded, slightly weathered realism” of its working harbors. “There are beautiful textures everywhere you point the camera,” he says. “The natural granite, the fog rolling in off the water, the silvery light. For our purposes, it reads as both beautiful and a little foreboding at the same time.” Turning Cape Ann into a fictional setting meant skipping some iconic locations like the Fisherman’s Memorial. Chiodo says he quickly intervened when he saw the camera crew point their equipment at Motif #1, the buoy adorned red building on Rockport Harbor that is famous among artists. “I told them, ‘Before you fall in love with that, which I can see you’re doing, know that it might be one of the most photographed buildings in the world,’” he recalls. “It looks like just something on a dock, but it’s pretty iconic.”
The series does feature Rockport’s White Wharf and Bearskin Neck, as well as Lanes Cove and Eastern Point Lighthouse in Gloucester. Chiodo says he was particularly excited to get the relatively secluded Half Moon Beach, located in Gloucester’s Stage Fort Park, into the show. “I don’t know what it is about that beach,” he says. “I’ve always had that in the back of my head to put in a movie. It’s an oddball beach. It’s enclosed, and there’s something encroaching about it—claustrophobic, maybe, even. It looked great on screen.” Creating the fictional island town felt like “inventing puzzle pieces and then figuring out how to fit” them together, Sprenger says. “We went through great lengths to avoid photographing newer looking homes and modern architecture,” he says. “In the edit, we were also very disciplined about the logic of the island’s geography of where locations sat relative to the water or the wooded inner island so the audience could build a mental map of the island’s layout.”
More than other projects he’s worked on, Chiodo says, there’s been buzz about the Widow’s Bay shooting locations. People on social media have been planning trips around the show, and in August, Travel + Leisure magazine ran an article encouraging readers to “set jet” to Cape Ann and other filming locations in Massachusetts. With Rockport and Gloucester already providing much of the architecture and topography needed to bring Widow’s Bay to life, why look elsewhere for settings like taverns, churches, and the town hall? Partly, Chiodo says, those decisions were made out of a desire to find sites that would be as easy as possible to “bring to neutral” (meaning minimal set dressing would be needed to make a location match the show’s script).
But also, Chiodo says, producers wanted to be careful not to bring too much disruption to small, densely settled coastal communities. “That’s a good way to wear out your welcome.” Only a few months after the Chiodoled “field trip” alighted in Rockport, the production was filming scenes on Bearskin Neck in early May, with a cast and crew of more than 150 people. Chiodo says the crew tried to minimize its footprint, especially as shooting stretched on into the high season. “I think it was a great partnership,” Chiodo adds, “but we’re a little bit of the circus coming to town.”