The Waterfront, Netflix review - fish, drugs and rock'n'roll

You wouldn’t really want to belong to the Buckley family, a star-crossed dynasty who run their fishing business out of Havenport, North Carolina. As Bree Buckley (daughter of Harlan and Belle) tells recently-discovered family member Shawn, “I wouldn’t wish us on anybody.” The family members all have their problems.

For instance, Bree (Melissa Benoist, pictured below) is a recovering (with difficulty) addict, and she’s stricken by the memory of how she inadvertently burned down her home with her young child in it.

As it happens, the family fishing operation is struggling to survive, and in order to make ends meet Cane Buckley (Jake Weary) has resorted to using the family’s fishing fleet to transport drugs, which ounce for ounce are proving vastly more lucrative than the usual aquatic prey. Snag is, drug-running is a dangerous and hotly-contested industry.

Imagine Cane’s horror when the Buckleys’ boat is found washed up on the beach, with both its crew (who were slaughtered and thrown overboard) and $10m worth of heroin nowhere to be seen. Stressed-out Cane is consoling himself in the arms of his former girlfriend Jenna (Humberly Gonzalez), to the disgust of his wife Peyton (Danielle Campbell).

It all sets the scene for creator Kevin Williamson's rollicking fable of ambition, desperation, infidelity, emotional bonds tearing at the seams and all kinds of illegal stuff, from drug-running to corruption and murder. Casting his big and baleful shadow over the family is Holt McCallany’s Harlan, a rugged patriarch you could picture in a Scorsese movie or one of Taylor Sheridan’s Western-nouveau creations. He’s inordinately fond of whisky (or more accurately whiskey), and is prone to mortality-evoking chest pains which he doggedly ignores. The fact that the family is $6.8m in debt is not helping his health.

His wife Belle is played with passion and panache by Maria Bello (whom some may recall from the Viggo Mortensen flick A History of Violence). She’s just as tough as Harlan, though considerably more photogenic, and she has devised a scheme whereby the Buckleys can sell off some family land to a property developer for colossal sums of money. Harlan, however, refuses to countenance using what he considers a generational heirloom in such a fashion.

Mind you, all this trouble and strife isn’t exactly new to the Buckleys. Harlan’s dad, for instance, met a hideous end when he was beaten to death by thugs from the Cali Cartel after he’d unwisely shown them a lack of respect. It seems to run in the blood, since it’s not long before Harlan is making overtures to the neighbourhood’s new drug lord, a man known only as Grady (pictured below, Jake Weary as Cane with Danielle Campbell as Peyton).

It’s Grady who gives the show an extra squirt of rocket-fuel. He’s played by Topher Grace as a giggling maniac who admits cheerfully to having been diagnosed as a narcissistic psychopath. He’ll shoot somebody in the head as casually as another person might check their iPhone for messages, and thinks it’s huge fun to watch an underling being splattered to bloody chunks by a stream of bullets from a Gatling gun.

This tangled web shakes itself out addictively over eight episodes, as black comedy mixes with lashings of ultra-violence, seasoned with plenty of soap-esque melodrama. There's also atmospheric musical accompaniment from a string of down-home artists like Chris Stapleton, Lee Ann Womack and Gary Clark Jr. You may hardly believe a word of it, but once you climb aboard you’ll be hanging on for dear life.

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