The Waterfront review: Netflix’s top show has no idea how terrible it actually is

In just the first two episodes of The Waterfront, there were two murders, a corrupt sheriff, a family member informing to the feds, one attempted barbecuing of a former beauty queen, a secret love child, a heart attack, missing drugs and several assaults.

The next episode, someone gets it through the head with a screwdriver.

Not exactly subtle.

The Waterfront hails from Kevin Williamson, best known as the creator of Dawson’s Creek and the writer of teen horrors including Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer, The Faculty and Teaching Mrs Tingle.

Williamson drew on his personal history growing up in a fishing family in the US state of North Carolina to create a melodramatic show about the Buckleys, who has a mini empire in their town.

They own and run the fishery and a restaurant, and the Buckley name is emblazoned all over the place. They’re also cash-strapped and in debt, so while the patriarch, Harlan (Holt McCallany), is laid up with heart problems, his son, Cane (Jake Weary), strikes a deal to move drugs on the family’s boats.

Obviously, this stirs up a whole world of trouble with fierce drug dealers (an unhinged Topher Grace), in addition to the mountains of drama already percolating – infidelities, sibling rivalry, addiction, secrets from the past, nosy law enforcement, child custody issues, parent-child tensions, and land deals. It’s a lot.

The Waterfront is a completely ludicrous show that you couldn’t possibly entertain without a buffet of cackles, snorts and derisive sounds. You will laugh 75 times more than all the Buckleys combined – they laugh zero, everyone takes themselves way too seriously.

Which was confusing because Williamson based the character of Harlan partly on his own father, who in the 1980s was convicted of drug running on his fishing boat. Williamson told IndieWire that his father, who died in 2020, had a big sense of humour which he thought was beautifully captured in the show.

All respect to Williamson, his personal memories and his creative vision, but that’s not the show he made. The Waterfront has no self-awareness and definitely no chill.

What this show is a soap opera. It may have great onscreen talent in McCallany, Grace and Maria Bello, and decent production values thanks to a better budget, but serious drama this could never be.

It’s terrible, but never hits so-bad-it’s-good levels because it doesn’t realise it’s awful. The dialogue is stilted, the characterisations are shallow and the plotting is nonsensical – which would all be acceptable if it was honest about being a soap opera.

On Netflix’s own “editorial” promotional website, Tudum, a set-visit report detailed one scene it described as “what could be a soapy showdown turns into something much more meaningful and mature”.

Wrong. Super sudsy.

Williamson might have intended for The Waterfront to be a grown-up evolution from his previous works, which also included teen supernatural shows The Vampire Diaries and The Secret Circle, but this is no different. The theatrics are high, the disbelief factor even more so.

It’s masquerading as something it’s not. The Waterfront has shades of Yellowstone and Ozark, but even those two shows were faded facsimiles of predecessors including Dynasty and Breaking Bad.

There are plenty of fans who want to believe that what used to be called primetime soaps are prestige dramas.

Yellowstone, in particular, enjoyed the delusions of a segment of the audience that the neo-western was something other than a pulpy Dallas rip-off just because it had pretty landscape shots, former big screen star Kevin Costner astride a horse and lots of people getting murdered in grisly ways.

The Waterfront isn’t even that. It’s more like the fourth sheet in a carbon book, the impression so faded as to be illegible.

At least Yellowstone revealed a cultural impulse towards a slice of Americana, an imposed “way of life” that certain demographics desperately clung onto, as if land, liberty and the pursuit of economic dominance, no matter who you exploited, was still an entitlement. At least for old, white men.

But the discourse around the show and its appeal was more thoughtful than anything on the actual screen, and the external intellectualising of the series gave it more credibility than it deserved.

The Waterfront can’t lay claim to that. This isn’t, in Netflix’s parlance, a gourmet cheeseburger, it’s a half-bag of stale Burger Rings.

This is just a trashy soap opera, an extruded snack with no substance. If it was honest about that, it could’ve been way, way more fun.

The Waterfront is streaming on Netflix