Whoever it was that first decided eight episodes was enough for a suitable TV season really did the medium a disservice. Netflix’s “The Waterfront” is just the latest example.
Created by Kevin Williamson, the drama series is set on the North Carolina coast and centers on the somewhat broken Buckley family, owners of a small fishery empire in a small beach town. Of course, all is not what it seems with the Buckleys. They’re in massive debt, and the only thing to do (aside from sell their waterfront property) is to temporarily go back to their old gig and run drugs in their fishing boat. This is a long Buckley family tradition, but it all immediately goes awry because this time around, they have no idea who they’re really dealing with — more on that later.
Even without the drugs, the Buckleys have a lot going on. Harlan (Holt McCallany) and Belle (Maria Bello) have a rocky marriage with cheating on both sides and very different ideas about how to get the fishery out of debt. Their son Cane (Jake Weary), who runs the place after his father stepped back, has a somewhat strained relationship with his wife Peyton (Danielle Campbell) and is thrown when his high school girlfriend Jenna (Humberly González) moves back to town. Daughter Bree (Melissa Benoist) is a recovering addict who is trying to regain custody of her teenage son. She’s made so many mistakes that hardly anyone trusts her, so she’s often stuck on the outside of her family and quickly written off when she tries to play a bigger role in the family businesses.
There’s a lot to establish and then immediately upend in such a short amount of time, and I found myself wishing there was more — not just more after the finale, but more in the middle to let this family live and breathe before things fell apart. Kevin Williamson created “Dawson’s Creek” and brought “The Vampire Diaries” to TV, and both of those shows aired in the era where TV shows had 20-some episodes a season. Not every episode was amazing or moved the plot forward, but it offered a glimpse into the characters that made you care about them. Those slower moments made the big, flashy ones more significant. Eight episodes does not give “The Waterfront” enough time to build a status quo to be upended by an unhinged opium maniac.
Speaking of that unhinged opium maniac, Topher Grace as Grady is the only fun “The Waterfront” seems to be having, or has time to have. He’s a tech bro disrupting the opium industry with a puffy vest and a poppy field, and he’s trying to be reasonable here. He’s just trying to run his business and it’s not his fault that everyone else isn’t always choosing to do what he wants them to do. It’s their funeral!
He almost seems like he’s in a different show sometimes, the show I’d rather be watching. Based on Williamson’s previous work, he has that show in him. It just feels like limiting a writer like Williamson to such a truncated season is doing him a disservice, and it never fully feels like a Kevin Williamson project. It’s too much for a movie, too little for TV, and so it just feels incomplete, which is a TV-wide problem.
Shows like “The White Lotus” work with seven or eight episodes because that’s just a snapshot of one moment in the lives of a bunch of strangers. This is a family with a rich, complicated history and a way of life that’s being interrupted, but we hardly get to know what that way of life is like before it’s all thrown into chaos. It forces all the characters to constantly have to tell us things they could have shown, and reveals that could have been exciting have to be rushed.
All that said, it’s not as if the show isn’t watchable. The cast is good, everyone is giving solid performances, and there are enough shenanigans to sustain a solid crime drama. But it’s hard to invest in a good crime family when there’s hardly any time to see them succeed at the crime. Things go wrong at every turn out of necessity, and it makes it harder to envision them ever going right. We’re told that Harlan is the son of a great drug kingpin, and that he turned his business legitimate and then was forced to step back because of issues with his heart. That’s the kind of thing that might eat at a guy, but it’s barely addressed after the first episode.
Cane, meanwhile, goes on a topsy turvy journey with his wife and ex-girlfriend that forces all three of them to do and say crazy things that are hardly earned. He’s the kind of guy in the kind of romantic mess that could, in another world, attract the kind of passionate audience that creates hashtags and writes fanfiction, but there’s no time for that sort of character exploration here. Benoist does her absolute best as sister Bree, but she too is moving too fast to get a grasp on any of her choices.
The good news for “The Waterfront” is that its problems are fixable with even just a slightly longer season in the future. “Ozark,” another Netflix crime family drama, got 10 episodes for its first two seasons, then 14 for the final season. “Breaking Bad” started with seven episodes in its first season, then settled on 13. Even just two more episodes would have helped slow the pacing down and give both the audience and the characters the chance to get comfortable before Grace arrived to stir things up.
Sure, it’s no longer as feasible to long for the days of 22 episodes and multiple agonizing love triangles in a season of “The Vampire Diaries,” but what happened to a cool 13 and a fictional crush or two?
“The Waterfront” is now streaming on Netflix.
