“The Waterfront,” a Netflix drama created by Kevin Williamson, is set in North Carolina in a small coastal town. The Buckleys are local royalty — not only in the sense that they’re well known and powerful, but also in that they’re tortured by their circumstances and deeply resent one another, even as they feel a duty to protect the family.
The show is one of many to follow the “Yellowstone” model, a family saga of violence and secrets, of huffy men and sly women, of distinctive names (Cane, Harlan, Diller, Hoyt). It is also about land that’s been in this family for generations, gosh darn it — land that’s our legacy if only the cruelties of debt and developers would abate.
Our gruff patriarch is Harlan (Holt McCallany), a drunk and a womanizer with heart troubles and a shady past. His wife, Belle (Maria Bello), has her own valuable secrets and runs the family restaurant. Their son, Cane (Jake Weary), meddles with the fishing side of the business, and their daughter, Bree (Melissa Benoist), tenuously sober and trying to rebuild a relationship with her surly teenage son (Brady Hepner), wants more responsibility in the family’s enterprises. But Belle isn’t so sure she’s ready. Cane has gotten himself into a spot of trouble with a drug ring, and suddenly his side hustle is a bigger and bigger problem.
Only three of the eight episodes of “The Waterfront” were made available for review, so I cannot speak to its stamina or big arcs. But these early chapters do a few things well.
Whatever its flaws may be as it goes on, “The Waterfront” does not start slow — it knows how to escalate. The bodies start piling up quickly and surprisingly, the double-crossing starts right away and the flirtatious glances turn to naughty trysts within an episode. Mysterious strangers do not remain so mysterious or strange for too long. The show often lacks texture, but it compensates with earnest momentum.
The series also has dark fun with its setting, and its moody crimes include murder by fishing net, intimidation by dunking someone as shark bait and hiding a body in a swamp in the hopes that alligators will take care of the rest.
Performers who play family members don’t have to look like one another, but it’s always a real treat when they do, and “The Waterfront,” with casting by Libby Goldstein and Junie Lowry Johnson, is a bacchanalia of similar jawlines. Weary mirrors some of McCallany’s physicality, and the resemblance is even stronger when Cane emulates his father’s charisma. This all lends the show more depth than its plot alone can achieve.
Williamson first made a coastal-TV splash in the 1990s when he created “Dawson’s Creek,” which was set in New England but, like “The Waterfront,” filmed in North Carolina. His other work includes writing “I Know What You Did Last Summer” and multiple “Scream” movies, and adapting “The Vampire Diaries” for television.
You can see some of that DNA in the little flickers of audacious teen dialogue that pop up here; Bree’s son, when pressed by his mother about having any kind of dating life, sarcastically snaps that it’s “mostly group sex.” Cane’s own teen adventures resurface when his high school sweetheart (Humberly González) moves back to town. Though he’s a happily married family man, confronting the living embodiment of his youthful failures sends him reeling.
“The Waterfront” seems unlikely to be as seismic as some of Williamson’s best-loved work, but it does have more bite than many other streaming dramas set in beach towns with surprisingly high murder rates. The dialogue is at least occasionally snappy, and McCallany and Bello make excellent sparring partners.
Margaret Lyons is a television critic at The Times, and writes the TV parts of the Watching newsletter.
The post ‘The Waterfront’ Brings More Murder to Netflix appeared first on New York Times.
