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Creator Kevin Williamson has said The Waterfront is the most personal project of his career, inspired by his own father, who ran fishing and shrimping boats in North Carolina and, during a period of financial hardship in the 1980s, became involved in smuggling drugs by sea. Williamson drew on those family memories to ground the Buckleys' story.
Williamson made his name as the writer of the Scream films and the creator of Dawson's Creek, and he returned to the coastal North Carolina world of his youth for this series, setting it in a fictional town modeled on the region where he grew up.
The cast pairs Holt McCallany and Maria Bello as the embattled heads of the family with Melissa Benoist, best known as the star of Supergirl, cast sharply against type as their addiction-scarred daughter fighting to rebuild her life.
The Waterfront is a soapy, sun-drenched Netflix crime drama from Kevin Williamson, the writer behind Dawson's Creek and the Scream films, returning to his native North Carolina for a story of family, legacy, and criminal temptation. The series centers on the Buckleys, a once-dominant fishing dynasty in the fictional coastal town of Havenport whose empire is crumbling. To save the family business, patriarch Harlan Buckley and his relatives are drawn back into the drug-running that built and nearly destroyed them a generation earlier.
Holt McCallany stars as Harlan, a hard, proud man recovering from heart attacks and desperate to hold his territory, with Maria Bello as his sharp-edged wife Belle and Melissa Benoist as his troubled daughter Bree, a recovering addict fighting to regain custody of her son. As the family's smuggling operation reignites, long-buried secrets, rival criminals, and law enforcement all close in, and the Buckleys discover how much they are willing to sacrifice to protect their name.
Williamson has said the show is his most personal, drawing on his own father's history, and that lived-in specificity gives the pulpy melodrama a surprising emotional weight. Anchored by a committed ensemble and Williamson's gift for cliffhangers, The Waterfront became a summer streaming hit and is available on Netflix.
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