Topher Grace Almost Saves Netflix Soap

Watching Netflix’s The Waterfront. A journey.

Me, after the pilot for The Waterfront: This isn’t necessarily a good show, but it’s a serviceable attempt to reproduce the sort of accessible, young-skewing soap opera The CW and The WB used to make, with a solidly above-average cast.

Me, after episodes two and three of The Waterfront: Having a solidly above-average cast and occasional bursts of cartoonish violence isn’t enough if the characters are thin and the drama and settings are wholly artificial.

Me, during the fourth episode of The Waterfront: Yeah, there are no real “ideas” at play here, nothing fresh to transcend the bblock bits, and it may be just about time to quit … HOLY COW, TOPHER GRACE AS A SOCIOPATHIC DRUG KINGPIN.

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. But the That ’70s Show veteran periodically makes The Waterfront feel like a completely different show — one that’s wilder, sillier and generally less predictable.

I’m guessing there will be some viewers who are fully engaged in this somewhat grown-up version of Outer Banks — Older Banks — and find Grace’s arrival to be a needless distraction. For me, he was a welcome and insufficient distraction, exactly enough to keep me engaged in the season’s second half — usually only for three to five minutes at a time — but not nearly enough to make me enjoy it.

The Waterfront begins with an attack at sea, as two sailors — Kevin Williamson completists will be very amused by the cameos — have their vessel and their mid-sized drug shipment stolen (and their lives taken, though they’re barely characters and nobody cares).

The boat, it turns out, is owned by Cane Buckley (Jake Weary, auditioning for the coveted role of Alt-Joshua Jackson), operator of a struggling local fishery and scion to one of the key families in Havenport, North Carolina, a waterfront community that doesn’t exist in the real world and barely exists in this fictional one. The Buckley family used to straddle the line between legitimate and criminal, then they went straight. But now, as they’re on the verge of losing everything, it may be time to return to criminality.

Harlan (Holt McCallany, reliably gruff), Cane’s father, has had recent heart issues and he’s drinking and philandering his life away. Belle (Maria Bello, reliably steely), Cane’s mother, is running the family restaurant and doing her best to ignore Harlan’s drinking and philandering. Bree (Melissa Benoist, sincere but unconvincing) is a recovering addict whose rock bottom involved an act of arson that makes it illegal for her to see her teenage son (Brady Hepner’s Diller) without supervision.

Cane has a former beauty queen wife (Danielle Campbell, feisty but underused) and a young daughter who’s mostly off-screen — a good thing since the season-opening tragedy is just the first step in an escalating drug war that comes to involve the local sheriff (Michael Gaston’s Clyde), a hunky DEA agent (Gerardo Celasco’s Marcus) and, eventually, Topher Grace’s Grady.

Especially in the early episodes directed by frequent Williamson collaborator Marcos Siega, everything in The Waterfront looks polished and pretty, to the point that nothing looks real. It’s a commercial for filming in North Carolina — from Cane and Peyton’s absurdly nice coastal home (which is only actually opulent in the pilot and then becomes generic and barely utilized) to the fishery (which has been production-designed to suggest that, despite allegedly serving as the town’s economic backbone, nobody works there and certainly nobody guts fish there). There’s a Main Street that looks like it was designed by the Chamber of Commerce to resemble a small-town Main Street in a Netflix TV show. Mostly, though, it’s so wholly a product of Kevin Williamson’s imagination and so wholly divorced from actual, real-world grounding that I’m surprised he didn’t name the town after himself.

In general, despite drawing specific details from Williamson’s past, The Waterfront doesn’t come across as a personal story. The creator has talked about his fisherman father and his North Carolina upbringing, but what’s actually been produced here resembles only a standard-issue combination of boring familial crime saga and unconvincing affluence block, made suitable for streaming — and therefore distinct from Williamson’s broadcast approach — by slightly bloated episodic running times, a squishy fascination with momentary gore, and one shot featuring what might be visible pubic hair (not a block scene, mind you, because the chemistry-free block in The Waterfront is wholly CW-friendly). The characters in The Waterfront might be older than the characters in Outer Banks, but the show is comparably nuanced and less fun.

One of my favorite tests for any ensemble show is, “Do the characters give the impression that they have lives that continue even when the cameras aren’t running, or are they robots that get powered down whenever we go to a different storyline?” I’ve rarely watched a show in which so many of the main characters absolutely don’t exist when they aren’t part of the story.

There’s dreamy bartender Shawn (Rafael L. Silva), who briefly seems like he might become the show’s actual hero, except that he has no personality and his motivation is grounded only in plot and not emotion. There’s Cane’s ex-girlfriend Jenna (Humberly Gonzalez), who arrives in town as a caretaker for her predominantly off-screen ailing father, and makes several references to a journalism career that are amusing in their pointlessness. There’s Dave Annable as a land developer periodically working on a deal with Belle, and Bree’s son Diller who mentions in one line of dialogue that school isn’t in session. Even actors as sturdy as McCallany and Bello fall victim to this infection, so thoroughly that I kept finding myself haunted by two early scenes in which Harlan goes from scruffy to clean-shaven — a fairly normal occurrence in the real world, but anomalous evidence of off-camera behavior here.

This is why Topher Grace’s arrival in the series is such a bizarre pleasure. It isn’t that Grady is some wild deviation from the sunny-but-sarcastic archetype that Grace reliably plays (even when cast as David Duke), but the context in which his trademark persona is utilized here is something entirely new. Grady is a weirdo with daddy issues and no impulse control, and it doesn’t make complete sense how he earned the loyalty of his lieutenants or what his business plan is. And because it doesn’t completely make sense, I kept wanting to spend more and more time watching him (both Grady and Grace, whose mixture of cheery and maniacal is perfect) and his operation, since there’s nothing happening with the Buckleys that I haven’t seen in episodes of Yellowstone, Ozark or even One Tree Hill.

Grady has a scene in the sixth episode in which he uses an unexpected torture device in a sadistic and hilariously photographed manner. I watch entirely too many scenes of televisual torture and I can say, without hesitation, that this is one of my favorite televisual torture scenes, bordering on unique. But if nothing else in The Waterfront even comes close to original and my reasons for recommending the show would be limited to one supporting performance and one two-minute torture scene, that isn’t much of a recommendation, is it?