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Kevin Williamson's The Waterfront is Netflix's effort to have its own Yellowstone (with fishing boats), but it's lacking on several levels.
Posted in: Review, TV | Tagged: The Waterfront
The Waterfront: Yellowstone Wannabe with Boats Lacks Sheridan Vibe
Kevin Williamson's The Waterfront is Netflix's effort to have its own Yellowstone (with fishing boats), but it's lacking on several levels.
A lot of new TV series want their own Yellowstone, and Kevin Williamson's The Waterfront is Netflix's latest attempt, a kind of "Yellowstone with fishing boats" as it were, and, well, it's really dumb. The soapy saga of a fishing family that dabbles in crime and smuggling to pay off debts has all the tropes you come to expect, with a solid cast of actors who have all been great elsewhere, but are stuck with playing characters that are network TV stereotypes in a watered-down network-style wannabe family crime saga.
Holt McCallany plays Harlan Buckley the obligatory patriarch of the Buckley Clan and terrible father whose idea of tough love is his fists, drinking and whoring to get over a near-fatal heart attack. In contrast, his expected long-suffering wife Belle, played by Maria Bello, runs the business and makes drastic moves under his nose. Jake Weary plays Cane, their hapless son who has to act as intermediary in a drug deal that goes south and draws the scrutiny of the law. Melissa Benoist is their daughter who's a recovering addict fighting for custody of a teenage son who looks only a few years younger than she is, and is the first recovering drug addict and beleaguered mother I've ever seen on TV who appears to have absolutely zero angst or emotional turmoil. It's not her fault. Benoist is a likable screen presence, as she proved over the years of starring as Supergirl on the CW. She can only play what was written for her, and the writing is, like every other character's, skin-deep. Oh, and Topher Grace shows up as a preppie drug kingpin, and he's as menacing as that combination of words sounds. And he's the season's Big Bad. There's a missed opportunity here to do a sitcom, but Williamson seemed to take it both way too seriously, yet too lightly, to make it matter or feel real.
Everything and Everybody is Dumb
Here's the big problem with The Waterfront: EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENS IN THIS SHOW IS STUPID. Everyone says obvious, unsurprising, stupid things. Everything stays surface level, no matter how violent things get. There's no real feeling of intensity despite the usual Screenwriting 101 "twists" (all of which are telegraphed way in advance) and violence. It's as if Mobland was written as an after-school special. It even lacks the feverish melodramatic feel of telenovelas. The entire cast has been much better in other projects, and are here reduced to playing TV Network Tropes who talk like TV characters, not people. Why do they claim in the finale that Cane crossed a line by finally killing someone? He was already a criminal complicit in several murders throughout the season, so why would his finally doing one himself be a fall from grace when he wasn't a good person to start with? A cardboard character killed another cardboard character, and they all act like cardboard characters. There is not a single bit of real human behaviour on this show. They're all TV trope puppets.
Is The Waterfront a Show Dawson from Dawson's Creek Would Have Made?
Creator and showrunner Kevin Williamson is best known for Scream, the original I Know What You Did Last Summer, and Dawson's Creek, and The Waterfront has the same oddly sunny, surface-level tone as all his work. He's a slight writer, and nothing feels like it really matters. It feels like a high school production of a Yell0wstone-type crime family saga. Williamson talked up the show by citing his own family background, like it's a macho Mayor of Easttown, but lacks the emotional intensity of HBO shows with its light, sunny CW tone from the first second to the last. This is not to knock him, but it might be the tonal limits of his writing. It's too breezy to be truly deep or suspenseful despite the high body count and threats throughout. It's kitsch, which can be fun on its own, and perhaps that's what The Waterfront really is in the end.
This is not to say that The Waterfront deserves to fail. It's still perfectly entertaining, if utterly unconvincing and forgettable. Everyone who makes a movie or TV series works their asses off to ensure its existence. The world is going to hell. Maybe we need to watch a show this stupid to take the edge off. A Netflix subscription is a lot cheaper than pharmaceutical opioids.
The Waterfront is streaming on Netflix. If enough people watch it, it might get a second season.
The Waterfront
5/10
The Waterfront is Netflix's latest attempt at their own Yellowstone but with fishing boats, but it's so shallow, clichéd and predictable that it fails to stick. The characters are all network tropes and there's no recognisable human emotion or dialogue in it, yet it's slick and pacy and entertaining if utterly forgettable. Maybe this kind of dumb entertaininment is what we need as the world falls apart.
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