Jump in, ‘The Waterfront’ Is Fine Summer TV

It’s easy to list all the shows The Waterfront will remind you of. There’s the Ozark of it all, as The Waterfront’s Buckley family is drawn into drug dealing and various local and international beefs. (Thankfully for your eyes and mine, there is no blue filter here.) There’s Yellowstone, with government regulations and industry norms forcing the once-working-class family to realize that they’re now far richer and have more to lose. The Waterfront creator Kevin Williamson’s TV breakthrough, Dawson’s Creek, of course looms large, since that show was also about hot people who live by the water and seemingly never spend any time in it because they’re too busy dealing with melodramatic romantic shenanigans. What comfort, all this familiarity! And what entertainment, because there’s nothing quite like sensational, just-this-side-of-campy organized crime to buoy you through the sticky, grimy days of summer.

The Waterfront, all eight episodes of which drop today on Netflix, fits swimmingly into the sweaty and sultry pattern established by summer-premiering series like Snowfall, Claws, and Animal Kingdom before it. Williamson, who was inspired by his own experiences growing up in North Carolina with a fisherman father relying on illicit tactics to stay afloat, calibrates every one of the series’ genre tropes to near perfection. The Buckleys are a family on the brink of downfall, turning to one last job to get them out of trouble, and they find kindred and kinship through murder and blackmail — you’ve seen this story, you know this story. It would be a lie to call The Waterfront narratively innovative. But what are you gonna do, turn down a delicious cheeseburger just because it uses the standard American cheese? Refuse to buy a perfect-fitting pair of jeans just because they’re a classic blue wash? The Waterfront is a return to tradition, which is to say it may be a binge-drop series premiering in 2025, but its approach to narrative and character has more in common with the primetime soaps of the late 20th century than the grim-dark family sagas of today’s prestige TV.

There’s violence here, undeniably: A fleeing man gets his limbs torn off by dozens of bullets fired from a high-powered machine gun; poisonous jellyfish are used as a torture device. But The Waterfront treats those scenes like requisites of the genre rather than where its actual interests lie, which is in melodrama. The series smartly jettisons (most) of the dead weight that so often drags down stories in this mode, instead leaning into the pleasantly trashy. If you’ve ever missed Melrose Place, here’s a show for you: love triangles and hidden identities, abductions and double-crosses, class warfare and child-custody disputes, a purportedly stylish woman whose wardrobe seems to consist only of knockoff Chanel tweed suits that she wears in North Carolina humidity. That’s insane behavior! And The Waterfront has fun with these little bits of texture and grain, making it feel as though the show is winking at its viewers while also remaining committed to a story about, as Billy Costigan Jr. paraphrases Nathaniel Hawthorne in The Departed, families rising and falling in America.

When The Waterfront begins, the Buckleys are in crisis. For generations, they’ve ruled the fictional town of Havenport, North Carolina, owning the harbor, fishery, and a bougie restaurant as well as a bunch of undeveloped coastal land. They’re the kind of people who live in mansions while still considering themselves the salt of the earth (or perhaps of the ocean), and their hands-on approach to running their empire has kept them popular despite being Havenport’s de facto royalty. But their time on top is beginning to run out. Patriarch Harlan (Holt McCallany, perpetually scowling like he has to hit a frown quota each episode) has been sidelined by two heart attacks, and wife Belle (Maria Bello) and son Cane (Jake Weary) are struggling to keep up with overfishing, environmental quotas that cut into their profits, and gas prices that make their fleet of ships very expensive to maintain. Years before, Harlan’s father, and later Harlan himself, had made extra money by running Colombian cartel drugs, but Harlan worked hard to get the Buckleys out — and he’s shocked to realize that Cane, overwhelmed by the family’s increasing millions in debt, got them right back in.

Where Harlan is decisive and self-possessed, Cane is anxious and unconfident, a good guy stymied by both the yoke of responsibility and his father’s tendency to cut him off at the knees (and punch him in the face). The two share a manly tendency to roll up their shirtsleeves past their forearms, but otherwise they’re opposites, a dynamic that McCallany and Weary play with effective contrast. The Waterfront is regularly rhythmic with its exposition and dialogue, as when Harlan wearily describes today’s drug dealers as “just a bunch of roughnecks looking for a payday from any asshole with a poppy field,” but some of the most revealing lines go to Weary, who puts just enough wistfulness into Cane’s description of himself as being “really good at almost.” It helps that Weary has played in this familial-organized-crime sandbox before as a regular on Animal Kingdom, and McCallany has proven himself as a loveably toxic daddy in Mindhunter and The Iron Claw. Together, they deliver the series’ most moving emotional arc and its most specific observations about how to weather changing tides.

Unfortunately, the Buckley women suffer in comparison. It’s not that Bello or Melissa Benoist, who plays the Buckleys’ outcast daughter, Bree, turn in poor performances; Benoist in particular does some good work in the back half of the season once the motivations for her recovering-addict character finally click into place. But Belle’s and Bree’s plots feel like they’ve been sacrificed in exchange for what they’ll eventually do if The Waterfront is renewed. They’re being set up for bigger stuff down the line while Harlan and Cane deal with this season’s enemies, No. 1 of whom is Topher Grace’s drug lord, Grady, owner of a “humble little opium startup.” Some viewers may experience tonal whiplash as The Waterfront toggles between Grace’s amusing, if thin, spin on the same old chummy Eric Foreman shtick he’s been doing for years and scenes where Belle grapples with a newly revealed family secret or Bree worries about relapsing. But hey, that’s a soap opera for you! Those tonal swings and breakneck pacing are part of the deal, and The Waterfront always feels intentional in its maneuvering of these elements.

In the past few years, as the Sheridan-verse has expanded, series about down-home Americans have favored characters whose badassness is tied to “traditional values” (some of them played by Sheridan himself). The Waterfront certainly isn’t immune to those aesthetics: There are copious country-song transitions, a whole lot of denim, and fleets of $80,000 pickup trucks. What’s appreciably different, though, is how The Waterfront limits its scorn to individuals representing only their own corrupt or greedy interests, rather than positioning its baddies as limp-dicked beta-cucks or hysterical functionaries who don’t know anything about some fantastical Real America. That keeps The Waterfront’s internal stakes manageable, and its thoughts on the American Dream pointed without falling into red-state-coded grievance. There’s too much care in the series, from its gorgeously warm natural lighting to its precise editing, for any of this to feel slapdash. That approach extends to how The Waterfront positions the town’s minority residents to scratch the façade of this mostly white, upper-class community. Cane’s high-school girlfriend Jenna (Humberly González), back in Havenport after becoming a successful journalist in Atlanta, is treated like the help by people filing into the Buckleys’ restaurant; a Black bank employee mentions that it took her 14 years to get promoted. Those little moments of microaggression feel like intentional blemishes on The Waterfront’s glossy surface, as if the series is encouraging us to question our expectations for which perspectives this type of show prioritizes, and which it discards.

“Money’s helping … it’s brought you back to life somehow,” Belle says to Harlan, which might be the most obvious idea expressed in The Waterfront — people without debt are less stressed, who knew! — but also reflects why the series works. Most of the focus in these eight episodes isn’t on the smuggling itself, but rather on how the decision to return to crime transforms this family, turning them harder and more paranoid, making them curious about what the future holds, stoking their obsession with honor in a world that feels increasingly reprehensible. The Buckleys are beginning to finally assess themselves as people, and the ensemble is so good at that self-reflection that they anchor all the alternating tragedies and theatrics and help nudge The Waterfront toward the deep end of smooth-brained summer TV.