Netflix’s New No. 1 Show Is Salty, Soapy, and Fully Adult
This article contains minor spoilers for The Waterfront.
If things continue at their current pace, all of television is in danger of turning into a genre that I like to call “Yellowstone, but … ” Of course, we have the Taylor Sheridan show’s many prequel spinoffs, but their success also seems to have inspired waves of Westerns and dramas about locally powerful families who have fallen on hard times. The latest “Yellowstone, but … ” show is The Waterfront, now streaming on Netflix, where it has immediately shot to No. 1 on the charts. This is a story set in a seaside town, following the locally powerful Buckley family, owners of a fishery, a restaurant, some beautiful houses, and undeveloped tracts of coastline, who have—you guessed it—fallen on hard times. Like the Duttons trying to hold on to their Yellowstone Ranch, the Buckleys need to arrest their downward mobility; their attempts to do so without betraying their beliefs, or one another, will be the meat of the story.
The Waterfront is a Kevin Williamson show, set (like his Dawson’s Creek) in coastal North Carolina, so it’s full of salty, beautiful people who do soapy things. But unlike Dawson’s Creek and Williamson’s latter-day hit The Vampire Diaries, this is a full-on adult show, with no teenage romance, and with moments of hyperviolence that startled me into audible exclamations of “Oh!” Adventuresome Netflix viewers looking for “Outer Banks without the treasure hunt” will likely find themselves confused, and hopefully minimally traumatized, by this one.
The Waterfront stars Holt McCallany, the granite-faced father-figure standout from Mindhunter and The Iron Claw, as the patriarch Harlan Buckley, whose own father was involved in the drug trade, but who has been running “clean” businesses for a couple of decades, ever since his father’s illegal activities ended in his death. Maria Bello plays Harlan’s wife, Belle, who tolerates her husband’s drinking and affairs, for reasons that are somewhat hard to parse. Jake Weary is his golden-boy son, Cane, a former football player and reluctant participant in all this crime who becomes the heart of the show, and Melissa Benoist is his daughter Bree, an addict in recovery who, we find out, has good reason to hate her family.
Will the Buckleys, having trouble keeping their businesses in the black, get back into running drugs? You bet they will! And for the sake of the show, it’s a good thing they do, because that’s what brings Grady, a drug dealer played by Topher Grace, into the mix, significantly livening up the action. Grace has gotten really good at being in on the trick that his face plays on you. You see those features and think “preppy; professional-managerial; Connecticut.” But there’s something creepy about a guy that clean-cut; a Topher Grace villain knows it.
Here, as Grady, Grace creates a really weird—maybe not always successful, but always interesting—villain. Topher Grace and Holt McCallany are the most recognizable actors on the show, and The Waterfront has placed them in opposition to one another, playing contrasting versions of powerful manhood. After the Buckleys eliminate the middleman they’ve been working with, they find Grady, who has a big drug operation set up in a farmhouse heavily populated by hired badasses, and try to do business with him. Grady at first looks like a vest-wearing tech bro, but we find out he has—as Harlan says—“no code.” We first see how disturbing he is when Grady orders his men to turn a minigun mounted on a truck on a henchman who’s displeased him and is running away across a field. Grady jokes about how loud the gun is, and mocks how the guy’s body jumps around as it’s riddled with bullets, while Harlan stares, shocked. Grady is there to show us that some people shouldn’t have power, to draw a contrast between his infatuation with it and our heroes’ supposed reluctance to use it. But he’s also kind of funny, which is good, because the dominant feeling you get from spending time in the world of the Buckleys is one of hungover, self-serious misery. (In that way, this show is, indeed, “Yellowstone, but … ”)
Out of some sociopathic impulse of friendliness, or maybe in order to control the situation, Grady cozies up to the Buckleys, showing up at their restaurant, convincing their teenage grandson Diller (Brady Hepner) to go on a hunting trip, and directly asking Harlan if they can become like family. When Harlan, Grady, and Diller walk in a field, hunting quail, the series best gets at the contrast it’s trying to draw between these two men. Grady is a guy who loves violence but doesn’t really know how to use a gun. Harlan tries to teach Grady how to aim, how to be disciplined with his hunting rifle; Diller, taught by Harlan, already knows. McCallany’s calm, paternal intensity, heightened by being thrown into this situation with an unpredictable and dangerous person, ramps up by the moment, until he gives off a wave of gravitas that makes you believe that indeed, Harlan is the kind of father who can be so-so, but who has (as Bree puts it) “moments of spectacular.”
But just as often, when McCallany and Grace face off, the manic energy rolling off Grady crashes into the stone-faced Harlan in a way that’s less effective, giving McCallany less to do. In one scene, as the two debate the terms of their relationship, Grady describes Harlan as having “resting stress face”; Grace pulls down the sides of his mouth, making a perfect simulacrum of McCallany’s. That’s funny! But it also makes Harlan into more of a caricature—something the show needs to break down, rather than build up, since it’s picked such a perfect Big Daddy actor for its Big Daddy character.
This first season of The Waterfront sets more tables than the waitresses at the Buckleys’ seaside restaurant. We see Cane’s moral dilemmas, Bree’s tragic history. But the best seeds it sows are in the relationship between Harlan and Belle. Belle is the kind of wife who accepts the appearance of Harlan’s out-of-wedlock son with barely a blink, but also one who tries, behind Harlan’s back, to sell a piece of land in a development deal that goes against Harlan’s principles but that would have gotten the family out of the drug business for good. This scheme aside, in this season, the parents are mostly on the same page. But by the end, we see that we may get a lot of McCallany vs. Bello next time around. That’s a good idea. Yellowstone always suffered because John Dutton had no plausible opposition inside his family. (Jamie does not count.) If The Waterfront is about a family managing its own decline, it only makes sense that in such a family, Mom and Dad would, quite often, find themselves fighting.
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