The Waterfront

Overall, “The Waterfront” is the Netflix equivalent of a beach read, but it’s highly entertaining. The series boasts all the good bone structure of a traditional family drama, with threads of criminality, infidelity, lies, drugs and everything in between woven throughout each episode.

“The Waterfront” is a keeper because of the outrageous behavior of its morally compromised characters — with Grace leading [t]he way.

“The Waterfront” seems unlikely to be as seismic as some of Williamson’s best-loved work, but it does have more bite than many other streaming dramas set in beach towns with surprisingly high murder rates. The dialogue is at least occasionally snappy, and McCallany and Bello make excellent sparring partners.

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.

It's fun, but totally insubstantial.

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.

While the character development of the core family could use some work, The Waterfront has some great crime thriller scenes propelled by Topher Grace's infectious and much-needed villain, who single-handedly made the otherwise passable Netflix crime thriller series worthwhile.

Despite the excellent cast, there were lines and situations that were so clunky and predictable that we shook our heads that they made it to the final cut. But there is an interesting twist at the end of the episode that leads us to believe that some of the clunkiness will eventually be ironed out.

The writing is trite (“It’s all key lime pie,” Harlan warns his son, “until you come home and find your wife and kid dead”), but the characters unleash on one another with such reliable fury that it sweeps you along, like a wave breaking on the shoreline.

It is escapist summer nonsense with – God, I hope – no pretensions to being otherwise. Dive into the adult creek and wallow in nostalgia as the waves of absurdity sweep towards shore.

Overall, the whole endeavor feels overly familiar. McCallany owns the screen anytime he appears, but the story wasn’t original enough to inspire viewing beyond the first two episodes.

The best thing about “The Waterfront” is a string of truly spectacular and nicely choreographed murders that’ll get your schadenfreude pumping. It’s because the various romantic entanglements don’t heat up enough to sizzle. While these scofflaw characters are chock full of scandals, salaciousness, and secrets, they’re missing the complexities that yank us into more addictive dramas.

Everything’s a little fuzzy, lacking in detail. Characters put on attitudes and get in and out of trouble — there are shootings and scrapes, surprising reveals and shocking events — but few are, or seem about to develop into, interesting people. .... There’s enough activity that some viewers, possibly a lot of them, will dig in just to see how this thing caroms into that.

The show throws some intriguing chum in the water with Harlan’s backstory, Belle’s desire for power versus her maternal instincts, and Bree’s surprisingly resonant crisis. But ultimately, the bait isn’t enough to hook you in.

“The Waterfront” goes all in, but too often that leaves its most entertaining elements dead in the water.

In the first few episodes of Netflix’s new drama The Waterfront, a man is tortured via shark, a woman is nearly set on fire in her suburban driveway, and a body gets dropped into an alligator-filled swamp. Yet the most remarkable thing of all is how boring it all feels.

Even if you haven’t seen “Ozark” or “Yellowstone” — heck, even if “The Waterfront” is the first series you’ve ever seen — there’s no mistaking a sinking ship.

The arrival of Topher Grace as he’s never quite been utilized before doesn’t quite save Kevin Williamson‘s latest attempt to launder semi-autobiographical details through slick genre contrivance.