The show, from “Dawson’s Creek” creator Kevin Williamson, struggles to find a middle ground between gritty family saga and goofy CW drama.
In the first few episodes of Netflix’s new drama The Waterfront, a man is tortured via shark, a woman is nearly set on fire in her suburban driveway, and a body gets dropped into an alligator-filled swamp. Yet the most remarkable thing of all is how boring it all feels.
Though the family crime drama, premiering June 19, boasts an impressive cast of small screen actors and a notable pedigree courtesy of creator Kevin Williamson—the man behind iconic teen franchises like Scream, Dawson’s Creek, and The Vampire Diaries—there’s little of his playfully wry tone here. Instead, the eight-episode series is a coastal-set Yellowstone knockoff that sinks more than it swims.
In place of the Duttons, The Waterfront centers on the Buckleys, the most prominent family in Havenport, North Carolina. Grizzled patriarch Harlan (Holt McCallany) is on his second heart attack and his umpteenth glass of whiskey. Glamorous matriarch Mae (Maria Bello) is quietly tolerating his affairs. Their former golden boy son Cane (Jake Weary) is struggling to let go of his high school glory days. And their black sheep daughter Bree (Melissa Benoist) is trying to stick with sobriety long enough to win back custody of her teenage son Diller (Brady Hepner).
Together, the Buckleys manage a commercial fishing business, run an upscale restaurant with a tourist patio, and own a gorgeous strip of untouched waterfront property. Only, when money gets tight, they turn back to the old family business that made Harlan’s dad a success—using their fishing boats to smuggle heroin and other drugs for a prominent criminal kingpin.
It’s a fine set-up for a bingeable series, but the trouble is The Waterfront can’t find the right tone to unspool its sordid tale of cod and cocaine.
Sometimes there’s a glossy CW lightness to the storytelling, like when the show treats it as a scandal that Cane takes an edible before a double date with his wife Peyton (Danielle Campbell) and his old high school girlfriend Jenna Tate (Humberly González). Other times it wants to be a gritty, violent crime drama, like when Harlan stabs an enemy in the neck and then covers up the murder by squishing the guy’s head under a classic car.
The Waterfront winds up feeling like half The O.C., half Breaking Bad, only without the cleverness and cohesion of either.
Despite the best efforts of McCallany, Bello, and especially Benoist, there’s too little specificity or humanity to the writing of the Buckley family drama. And Weary’s Cane is such a boring non-entity that you almost forget what he looks like each time he wanders offscreen. Where the series should be alive with high-stakes tension and the lived-in dynamics of a complicated, close-knit family, it’s awash in clichés and generalized platitudes instead.
Even the stuff specifically designed for drama is oddly dull. A handsome DEA Agent (Gerardo Celasco) is sniffing around the Buckleys. Mae is flirting with the man who wants to buy the family’s waterfront property. And a mysterious bartender (Rafael L. Silva) may be more than he seems. Yet those storylines are awkwardly stuck between trashy fun and genuine human drama in a way that just makes them fall flat. The Waterfront takes itself both too seriously and not seriously enough.
It’s a shame, because the series seems to have started from a more personal kernel of an idea. Williamson’s father was a North Carolina fisherman who turned to running drugs when the fishing industry capsized in the 1980s. While Williamson explored the wholesome parts of his seaside childhood in Dawson’s Creek, The Waterfront was meant to reflect the darker depths. Somewhere along the way, it became a show about the family at the top rather than the runners at the bottom.
To its credit, the series does find a little more juice in its second half, once Topher Grace joins the cast as an eclectic, uh, entrepreneur who teams up with Harlan. Grace’s goofier performance does a better job straddling the lighter and darker sides of the series than just about anyone else, and he helps fuel some high-octane action scenes in the final few episodes of the season. But, again, it’s hard to say who the ideal audience is for a show that earnestly invests in Cane’s 30-something love triangle in one scene and then zooms in on a man being torn apart by a machine gun the next.
Perhaps Yellowstone fans will be excited to watch that show’s vibe CW-ified and ported over to Netflix. Everyone else can just keep fishing for something better.