'The Waterfront' Is a Soapy Booze Cruise of a Crime Drama

'Ozark' meets 'Yellowstone' in North Carolina

Everybody look at me 'cause I'm sailing on a boat. Dana Hawley/Netflix; Hannah Roman

Kevin Williamson has remarkable range. He wrote the screenplays for horror classics Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer and then created the soapy teen drama Dawson’s Creek. Later on, he co-created the supernatural teen drama The Vampire Diaries, which was the biggest hit out of many shows he created after he broke out in the late ‘90s. He’s done a lot of varied stuff over the years.

Now, Williamson is back with The Waterfront, a new crime drama that’s different from anything else he’s done before — it’s arguably his most adult-oriented show or movie — but also features many of his trademarks: a coastal North Carolina setting like the one where he grew up (Dawson’s Creek and IKWYDLS were set in the same region), troubled family relations (a theme not unique to him, to be sure), and over-the-top violence (a guy gets stabbed with a screwdriver up through his throat into his brain, which is like a kill from of a slasher movie). Williamson has the ability to apply his particular talents and interests to many different genre contexts. And he has even better commercial instincts than Scott Frank.

For years, studios have been looking for the next/their own drama series about a fucked-up rich family in the broadly similar vein of Succession and Yellowstone. The Waterfront is the closest I’ve seen a show come to fulfilling that demand. It takes the family dynamic that drives those two shows — the ruinous effects of a narcissistic, impossible-to-please father on his adult children — and does something different enough to not feel like an imitation and familiar enough to feel like it’s in the same genre.

Most shows that have tried to be “the next Yellowstone” have done so by emphasizing the superficial aspects, like the Western setting and the soapy plots, but those are toppings on what makes Yellowstone work, not the meat of it. The meat is the family drama, the toxic relationships between people who are bound by blood but constantly in a power struggle with each other. The Waterfront understands that. It then stacks the other Yellowstoney signifiers — a country music soundtrack, a wealthy red state milieu, a plot consisting of rapidly compounding soap operatic antihero drama — on top of that foundation. And it really works. The Waterfront is an addictive watch.

The Waterfront follows the Buckleys, a prominent North Carolina family in decline. They’re royalty in the town of Havenport, where they own a commercial fishing business and a restaurant. But neither business is doing well. Patriarch Harlan Buckley (Mindhunter’s Holt McCallany, as gravel-voiced as John Dutton) is having heart trouble, and has taken a step back to allow his sandy-haired, red-faced failson Cane, played by Jake Weary, to run the fishing business, while his wife Mae (Maria Bello) runs the restaurant. Mae has been put through so much bullshit by her husband’s drinking and cheating and general selfish, self-serving behavior through the years that she’s over it, and is doing her own thing on the side – in business and pleasure – with a real estate developer played by very handsome actor Dave Annable. Their daughter, Bree (Melissa Benoist), is a temperamental recovering addict who works at the restaurant but isn’t allowed to know what’s really going on — which is that the family’s financial situation has become so desperate that Cane is letting drug traffickers use their boats to make ends meet. When those traffickers get robbed and murdered, the Buckleys find themselves pulled deeper into a chaotic criminal underworld that threatens to destroy everything they’ve built.

There are love triangles, secret children, dark secrets, and all kinds of other crime-soap developments. It’s all very juicy and twisty. It’s apparently inspired by Williamson’s own family history, which is crazy — his father was a fisherman who served time for drug trafficking in the 1980s. I think — I hope — it’s very loosely inspired beyond that, but still, how’s that for a “here’s why I’m qualified to tell this story” pitch? It’s like Williamson looked at his own life and said “This is exactly what Netflix is greenlighting right now.”

I know I spent the first half of this review comparing The Waterfront to Yellowstone, but it’s actually even more like Ozark, Netflix’s hit family crime thriller that ended in 2022 and is a Dad Shows Hall of Famer. The shows share a relentless forward motion. The plots move fast, and build to shocking crescendoes at the end of every episode. It’s very easy to imagine The Waterfront adding new characters every season as old ones get killed off, including new big bads, the same way Ozark did (Season 1’s big bad is a scenery-chewing Topher Grace as a cheerfully psycho yuppie drug kingpin. It’s kind of a cliched character, but Grace is having fun being the sociopathic comic relief.) Yellowstone wasn’t a thriller. There were episodes where barely anything happened at all. But like Ozark, The Waterfront keeps the plot thrumming.

Also like Ozark, the setting is curiously underdeveloped for a show about a place, which is extra odd because of Williamson’s personal connection to it. Nothing about Havenport, NC feels culturally specific. It could be any moneyed coastal town where people drink heavily on and around boats. The mise en scene in general is kind of affectless in The Waterfront. Lots of gray shirts and unmemorable interiors. The most interesting thing is that the characters are drinking in almost every scene. The constant intake of booze adds a unique flavor to the action. These characters are all semi-functioning alcoholics whose judgement is constantly impaired. Of course all this resentment, bitterness, lying, and manipulation is happening.

In the end, The Waterfront is fun, but it isn’t as compelling as Ozark or Yellowstone. The performances aren’t as strong as they were on Ozark, and the world-building isn’t as deep as Yellowstone’s. It doesn’t take itself as seriously, for better or worse. I kind of wish it would take itself even a little less seriously than it does. The reason why Scream works is because it indulges in the genre tropes while playing with them. Its half-satirical tone allows it to have it both ways. The audience can feel smart and dumb at the same time, which is a delightful sensation. But The Waterfront skews a little too dumb. Outside of Topher Grace, no one is winking. We know Williamson can manage a mischievous tone. Maybe if there’s a second season, he can get even nuttier with it.

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For Gold Derby, I interviewed comedian Roy Wood Jr. about his stand-up special Lonely Flowers. It’s a funny and thoughtful special about the loneliness epidemic, and I enjoyed talking to him about it. He opens and closes the special by saying “We ain’t gon’ make it,” and I asked him if he’s gotten more or less optimistic since he taped the special last fall. Click through to find out what he said.