‘The Waterfront’ Review: A Salty Mix of Family Feuds & Sharp-Edged Violence

Kevin Williamson, the man who once made Dawson a household name, returns to the small screen with The Waterfront, a steamy Netflix drama where the waters are anything but calm. Set in the fictional North Carolina town of Havenport, the series dives into the murky lives of the Buckley family, a once-proud fishing dynasty now floundering in corruption, addiction, and betrayal. If Dawson’s Creek was your jam in the early 2000s, this adult upgrade could feel like a reunion, except now everyone’s armed, angry, and running heroin.

At the center is patriarch Harlan Buckley (Holt McCallany), who’s just recovering from two heart attacks, though you’d never know it by his continued drinking and lack of filter. With the family’s businesses teetering on collapse, Harlan’s absence had left a vacuum, quickly filled by his underqualified son Cane (Jake Weary). Cane’s solution? Shift from seafood to smuggling. As he tells cousin Lynette to forge ownership records after a bloody drug run goes sideways, the tone is set: the Buckleys are in too deep, and the tide is turning fast.

“The Waterfront is loosely inspired by Williamson’s father, who was a fisherman and began smuggling drugs in the 1980s to make ends meet,” Netflix’s press notes remind us. That legacy bleeds into every scene, as the show threads real-world desperation into its soapy beats. From missing shipments to mounting debts, the Buckleys aren’t just weathering a storm, they’re drowning in it.

Maria Bello brings both steel and sorrow to Belle Buckley, Harlan’s wife and the family’s secret operator. While Cane turns to cartels, Belle is quietly plotting to sell sacred family land to a slick developer, sacred, at least, to Harlan’s late mother. The consequences, when they land, promise fireworks.

Then there’s Bree (Melissa Benoist), Cane’s sister and a recovering addict, whose return home is fraught with tension. Relegated to working at the family’s bar, Bree is trying to rebuild her life while reconnecting with her estranged son, Diller. But his anger runs deep, and Bree’s custody issues are compounded by Harlan’s impulsive decision to give the teen a job, putting mother and child in close quarters despite a court order. It’s the kind of layered, messy subplot that gives The Waterfront its emotional teeth.

The Waterfront delivers, it’s packed with sharp turns and sudsy melodrama.

Elsewhere, a familiar face from Cane’s past returns, his high school flame Jenna (Humberly González), now married, of course, and not to him. Her reappearance throws Cane’s already fragile marriage to Peyton (Danielle Campbell) into new territory. Peyton, who begins as a background character, emerges over the season as one of the more complex players in the story.

The show trades realism for velocity. The pace is relentless, twists, reveals, secret alliances, and double-crosses come rapid-fire. Characters who seem incidental in one episode are central the next. “You’ll never guess” becomes an unspoken mantra as the series jerks from plot point to plot point. Toxic masculinity? Present. Generational trauma? Checked. A class critique woven through a coastal soap? It’s all there, though none of it lingers long enough to dig in.

There are shades of Ozark in The Waterfront’s setup: a fractured family business spiraling into the drug trade, the weight of old sins, and law enforcement closing in from all sides. But where Ozark leans into cold, calculating dread, The Waterfront goes for sun-soaked chaos, melodrama, and high emotion with a Southern twist.

Still, for viewers craving a glossy, high-stakes family saga with criminal undercurrents, The Waterfront delivers. It’s packed with sharp turns and sudsy melodrama. And somehow, even amid its chaos, it maintains a weird sort of gravity thanks to McCallany and Bello, whose seasoned performances keep it from drifting too far out to sea.

With a cast anchored by McCallany and Bello, and an ensemble that includes Topher Grace hamming it up as a wildcard sociopath, the show straddles crime saga and family soap with glee. Whether you tune in for the drama or the chaos, chances are you won’t be able to look away, it’s highly bingeable.

All 8 episodes of The Waterfront are available now on Netflix.

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