Netflix's 'The Waterfront' Absolutely Nails It

Netflix’s latest binge addiction, The Waterfront, absolutely nails it. It hits that rare sweet spot between soapy melodrama, streaming prestige, and acting performances so good they make the trash feel like a perfectly aged bottle of gas station wine. This is it. Imagine Taylor Sheridan without the meandering subplots and heavy-handed moralizing. It’s got the pace of Outer Banks, but with adults and no treasure maps. It chews through plot like a Ryan Murphy series but actually never falls apart and manages to stick the landing. And it keeps the dysfunctional family drama of Bloodline without drowning in despair or the molasses pacing.

Holt McCallany — who frankly should have been lending his A-level gravitas to B-level chaos for decades — stars as Harlan Buckley, a hard-drinking, womanizing patriarch with a bad ticker. The series opens with what may be a heart attack, a hangover, or both. From his mistress’s bed, he asks her to call 911 and his wife, Belle Buckley (Maria Bello), who shows up at the hospital, coolly dismisses the mistress and calmly informs her, “I’ll take it from here.”

Harlan’s heart is mostly fine, but everything else is on fire. His son Cane (Animal Kingdom’s Jake Weary, who has young Joshua Jackson’s [RIP] looks but not the voice) has roped the family into drug running via their fishing boats to bail out the legit business: a family-run fishery and restaurant. Just a couple of runs, he says; just enough to clear the debt. But one delivery turns into more, and then there are bodies, crooked cops, and a sociopathic Topher Grace gleefully tearing through scenery and the Buckleys’ lives.

There’s also the sister, Bree (Melissa Benoist), a barely-holding-it-together alcoholic whose supervised visits with her son stem from that time she accidentally burned the house down. She’s sleeping with a heroin-addicted DEA agent she’s trying to manipulate into taking down her brother because she despises him. And there’s also Shawn West (Rafael L. Silva), the new bartender who doesn’t immediately mention that, oh yeah, he’s Harlan’s illegitimate son. And he knows Taekwondo. Why not?

Oh, and Cane? He’s caught between Peyton (Danielle Campbell), his too perfect wife, and Jenna (Humberly González), his warm and emotionally available high school sweetheart. Neither knows about the family’s extracurriculars, even after Peyton is nearly barbecued by a rival’s henchman. Things move fast on The Waterfront. Stuff breaks. People die or are tortured by man-of-war jellyfish. And somehow, Maria Bello’s Belle Buckley is always there to sweep up the mess or bury the bodies.

It’s all completely ridiculous and bonkers delightful. The show knows exactly what it is and never takes itself too seriously. Holt McCallany dials his McCallany-ness up to 12. Melissa Benoist turns Bree’s chaos into something deeply human. Jake Weary’s tragic poutiness flips from annoying to endearing-bordering-on-amusing. And then there’s Topher Grace. My God. He gives the performance of his life as a grinning, unhinged chaos agent, a Joker-type who drops one-liners with the same ease he drops bodies. Give this man an Emmy. And a Razzie. For the same performance! It’s like he’s trying to atone for Spider-Man 3 in a single performance, and somehow, he pulls it off.

And the best part? It took Kevin Williamson — the guy who gave us Scream and Dawson’s Creek — to finally crack the code on the high-stakes, emotionally messy family melodrama. The Waterfront is wildly entertaining. People will call it Yellowstone at sea, but honestly? Yellowstone wishes it had this kind of momentum, style, and flair. This show writes itself into corners and then blows the walls out. It’s gloriously over-the-top yet grounded on the Buckleys, and an absolute blast.

‘The Waterfront’ is streaming on Netflix.