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USA Today
2 hours ago
- Entertainment
- USA Today
How to watch 'The Waterfront,' new series from 'Dawson's Creek' creator
How to watch 'The Waterfront,' new series from 'Dawson's Creek' creator Show Caption Hide Caption Need a show to binge? These are the must watch shows this summer USA TODAY's TV critic Kelly Lawler breaks down the best TV shows you don't to want to miss this summer Move over, "Outer Banks": a new North Carolina-based drama series just hit Netflix. "The Waterfront" follows a prominent fishing family in coastal North Carolina whose legacy is at risk, according to the show's description. According to Netflix, the show's first season, which premiered on June 19, is "as much about family dynamics as they are about the lengths people will go to when their legacy is on the line." Kevin Williamson, the creator of hit shows like "Dawson's Creek" and "The Vampire Diaries," is the writer and executive producer of the show. It also features a star-studded cast, including Holt McCallany, who is known for "Mindhunter," and Melissa Benoist, the former star of "Supergirl." Here's what to know about "The Waterfront" Season 1. What is 'The Waterfront' about? The show follows the Buckley family of Havenport, North Carolina. They have long dominated the town's fishing industry and restaurant scene, but the family's empire has started to crumble after patriarch Harlan Buckley suffered from two heart attacks, Netflix says. His wife, Belle, and son, Cane, are working to keep the family businesses afloat while daughter Bree faces her own struggles in addiction recovery, per Netflix. Williamson told Netflix's Tudum the series is about trying to find the 'lesser evil' in a difficult situation. 'It's just about a bunch of people who make mistakes. They do some bad things and then they get in deeper and deeper and deeper,' he said. 'Sometimes they keep making worse mistakes and sometimes they find their way out and do the good thing.' When does 'The Waterfront' come out? "The Waterfront" Season 1 released on June 19 at 3 a.m. ET. All eight episodes of the show hit Netflix at that time. How to watch 'The Waterfront' Only Netflix subscribers will have access to watch "The Waterfront." The service has several monthly plans available, which start at $7.99 per month. The platform doesn't offer free trials. The show's entire first season will be available to stream on the platform starting on June 19 at 3 a.m. ET. 'The Waterfront' trailer 'The Waterfront' cast TV fans may see some familiar faces on "The Waterfront." Here's who's on the cast: Holt McCallany as Harlan Buckley Maria Bello as Belle Buckley Jake Weary as Cane Buckley Melissa Benoist as Bree Buckley Rafael L. Silva as Shawn West Humberly González as Jenna Tate Danielle Campbell as Peyton Buckley Brady Hepner as Diller Hopkins Melina Khan is a national trending reporter for USA TODAY. She can be reached at
Express Tribune
2 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Express Tribune
Netflix drops ‘The Waterfront', inspired by creator's real-life family drug ties
Netflix's new drama The Waterfront, which premiered on June 19, takes viewers deep into a coastal town torn apart by secrets, legacy, and survival—and it's rooted in real life. The eight-episode series comes from Kevin Williamson, the mind behind Scream, Dawson's Creek, and The Vampire Diaries. This time, Williamson delivers a raw, personal story inspired by his own father's descent into drug smuggling in the 1980s. The series stars Holt McCallany, Maria Bello, Melissa Benoist, and Jake Weary as members of the Buckley family, who were once-respected figures in the fictional town of Havenport, North Carolina. Once dominant in the local fishing industry, the Buckleys are now unraveling amid addiction, financial hardship, and long-buried betrayals. Behind the family's polished public image is a messy tangle of secrets and a willingness to do whatever it takes to maintain control—even if it means turning on one another. While the Buckleys are fictional, the emotional core of the story is deeply personal to Williamson. In recent interviews, the showrunner shared that his father, a fisherman by trade, began smuggling drugs during hard times to support the family. The consequences of that decision left a mark on Williamson's childhood and have stayed with him since. 'This is the story I've been circling for decades,' he said, referencing how the themes of loss, identity, and buried secrets have been present throughout his career—from slasher films like Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer to coming-of-age dramas. The Waterfront offers a gritty, emotionally charged look at the cost of survival and legacy—with Williamson finally confronting a story he's been carrying most of his life.
Los Angeles Times
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
‘The Waterfront': Where crime and dysfunction are a family affair
Kevin Williamson, whose previous screen creations include teen romantic drama ('Dawson's Creek'), meta slasher horror ('Scream') and teen supernatural gothic ('The Vampire Diaries'), has thrown his hat into the popular dysfunctional-family-doing-crimes ring with 'The Waterfront,' premiering Thursday on Netflix. Set in North Carolina, like 'Dawson's Creek,' it's a soap opera with drug smuggling. Welcome to Havenport. As crime families go, the Buckleys are not the Corleones, although their involvement with the darker side of life is generational. (Legitimately they run fishing boats and a fancy restaurant and are sitting on a prize piece of undeveloped seafront property.) Grandpa (deceased) was some kind of troublemaker; father Harlan (Holt McCallany), who fondly remembers the cocaine trade of his younger days, when people dressed well and were polite, has checked out of all family affairs after a heart attack or two in favor of drinking and cheating on his unusually understanding wife, Belle (Maria Bello). Meanwhile, without telling Harlan, Belle and son Cane (Jake Weary), a disappointed former high school hero, have been providing boats to idiot drug smugglers in order to pay off mortgages and loans that might cause them to lose their aboveboard businesses and cherished identity as the Buckleys of Havenport. When things go south, they get drawn in deeper — Cane, reluctantly, and Harlan, almost enthusiastically. It makes him feel like his old self again and gives him a reason to bully Cane — in order, he imagines, to toughen him up. But he's basically a bully — imposing yet somehow bland. Cane had a chance to play college football in Miami, but his father undercut his confidence; he is still waiting for it to return. 'I'm really good at almost,' he tells high school girlfriend Jenna (Humberly González), whose unexpected return to town has him emotionally unsettled, in spite of having a perfectly lovely wife, Peyton (Danielle Campbell), and a young daughter. 'Almost good enough. Almost a good guy. I'm almost a good husband, father, son. Just not quite, you know.' (Jenna is nominally a journalist, working in Atlanta. 'I read some of your articles online,' says Cade. 'You're a good writer!') The remaining Buckley, younger sister Bree (Melissa Benoist), is not currently doing any crimes, though she earlier burned her family's house down and is now permitted to see her sulky teenage son, Diller (Brady Hepner), only in the presence of a court-appointed chaperon. Not that Diller wants to see her at all; she did burn his house down. ('No one was hurt,' Bree points out. 'Physically,' Diller replies.) But manners are manners, whatever your mother's done, and she was an addict, after all. Now she's out of rehab, going to meetings and working in the family restaurant, though asking to get back into the front office. Perhaps she has an ulterior motive; so many of these characters do. Also in the intertwined mix: Gerardo Celasco as too-buff-by-half Drug Enforcement Administration agent Marcus Sanchez; Michael Gaston as dangerous Sheriff Clyde Porter, an old frenemy of Harlan, seething with class resentment; and Rafael L. Silva as Shawn, the new bartender at the Buckleys' restaurant, whose poor knowledge of mixology raises alarms. Topher Grace is on the cast list for a future appearance. Given that Williamson grew up where the series is set and is the son of a fisherman, one might have hoped for more local color and a little insight into the fishing business, rather than concentrating on the criminal shenanigans and sexy stuff that could happen anywhere and does. (Yes, I have odd hopes.) Instead, 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. (Only three episodes of eight were out for review, so something might well pop; still, that's three hours of television down.) They're a little bland, even, and what happens to any of them, though of idle interest, is never really a compelling question. Belle stands out by virtue of being played by Bello and given at least one scene in which she seems like a regular, empathetic person, and Bree can be sympathetic, given how much her son hates her. I would counsel Peyton, one of the few without an agenda — so far, anyway — to take her daughter and leave town, but I'm guessing that won't happen. If in some ways 'The Waterfront' feels assembled off the shelf, there's enough activity that some viewers, possibly a lot of them, will dig in just to see how this thing caroms into that. That's the engine that runs no small amount of television. It's easy enough to watch. And sometimes 'just OK' equals 'good enough.'
Time Magazine
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Time Magazine
Breaking Down the Harrowing Twist Ending of Prime Video's We Were Liars TV Adaptation
Warning: This post contains major spoilers for We Were Liars. If you've ever scrolled through BookTok, you may have been served a video—or, perhaps several—about E. Lockhart's We Were Liars. Although the young-adult novel was a best-seller when it was published in 2014, it had a significant resurgence in popularity when BookTok began to really gain traction during the early years of the COVID-19 pandemic. The corresponding hashtag for the title has since racked up over 21,000 posts. Now, an eight-episode TV adaptation of the novel from showrunners Julie Plec (The Vampire Diaries) and Carina Adly Mackenzie (Roswell, New Mexico) has arrived on Prime Video just in time for the summer binge-watching season. Part teen romance, part family drama, part psychological thriller, We Were Liars centers on Cadence Sinclair Eastman (played by Emily Alyn Lind), the eldest grandchild of Harris Sinclair (David Morse), the uber wealthy patriarch of the illustrious Sinclair family. The Sinclairs are practically American royalty and spend their summers vacationing on the fictional New England private island of Beechwood, just off the coast of Martha's Vineyard. Harris and his wife, Tipper (Wendy Crewson), have three grown daughters, Carrie (Mamie Gummer), Cadence's mother Penny (Caitlin FitzGerald), and Bess (Candice King), who all bring their own children to Beechwood each year. So, during the summer months, Cadence spends the majority of her time with the three other so-called Liars, the family's nickname for the group of four older kids who are all around the same age. In addition to Cadence, there's Carrie's son Johnny (Joseph Zada), Bess' daughter Mirren (Esther McGregor), and Gat (Shubham Maheshwari), the nephew of Carrie's longtime boyfriend Ed (Rahul Kohli). The Liars have grown up together, with Gat joining the annual pilgrimage to Beechwood for the first time the summer Cadence was 8 years old—or, as she refers to it, Summer 8. Cadence has always viewed her idyllic summers on Beechwood as something out of a fairytale. But everything changes during Summer 16, when Cadence and Gat realize they're in love with one another, Tipper's death brings the Sinclairs' long-simmering resentments bubbling to the surface, and the season ends with a tragedy that leaves Cadence with a serious head injury, chronic migraines, and selective amnesia. Desperate to remember the events that led to her washing up on the beach with brain trauma, Cadence returns to Beechwood for Summer 17 determined to make sense of what actually happened that fateful night. But when she arrives on the island, she discovers her mother—per the doctor's advice—has made everyone promise to let Cadence figure things out in her own time. The TV series largely follows the overall trajectory of the novel, but changes some details along the way—and adds one new, final twist. Though in terms of shock value, that one is nothing compared to the story's main, big reveal, which plays out in the show's finale. What is the big twist in We Were Liars? After spending the majority of Summer 17 trying to piece together her memories of the previous summer, Cadence finally comes to the realization that the reason her grandfather's mansion, Clairmont, has been totally rebuilt is because she and the other Liars burned it down. The teens made this decision because they saw the home as a symbol of everything that was wrong with their ultra-privileged family and thought it would put an end to their moms' constant bickering amongst themselves and with Harris over the family's money and inheritances. The plan was for each of the cousins to set a different floor of the mansion on fire before all escaping the house and meeting at the dock, where Gat would be waiting with the family's boat. But, naturally, things quickly went awry. After setting the ground floor ablaze, Cadence made it outside only to hear the family's two dogs, who had been locked in a downstairs room earlier that evening to keep them calm during dinner, yelping for help. She ran back inside to try to free them, but the fire had already grown too strong and she was forced to abandon them or die in the rescue attempt. When Cadence finally made it to the beach, she saw that none of the other Liars were on the dock and quickly realized something was wrong. However, it was at that moment that the gas main exploded and Cadence was knocked out and thrown into the water. Unfortunately, once Summer 17 Cadence remembers that part of the story, she realizes all of the other Liars were killed in the fire, as Johnny and Mirren were trapped on the higher floors and Gat had run into the house to try to save Cadence when she hadn't made it to the dock by the stroke of midnight. So while Cadence thinks she has been spending time with the Liars all of Summer 17, it's really just been her brain conjuring their spirits as a trauma response. Or perhaps, actual ghosts. It's somewhat unclear. Cadence later tells ghost Gat she feels responsible for his death because the reason she was delayed leaving the house the first time around was because she stopped to retrieve Tipper's infamous black pearl necklace, which had long been a source of conflict for the family. It was during that delay that Gat ran inside to try to rescue her. However, he says he doesn't blame her and tells her they all made mistakes. When a fully-aware Cadence finally has a conversation with Harris, he reveals that while the rest of the world believes the fire was caused by faulty wiring, he knows the truth. However, he tells her he's planning to give his last significant interview—coincidentally, for a TIME Magazine cover story—to put an end to the chatter about a family curse, and he wants to name her his heir before he retires from public life. But she will have to maintain the lie in order for him to do so. In the end, Cadence decides to strike out on her own without her grandfather's money or help, telling the reporter that she's "just really not into fairytales anymore." What is the new twist in the show? The new twist comes in when Carrie returns to her house on Beechwood, Red Gate, and we find out that not only has she broken her sobriety after many years, but she has also been interacting with her son Johnny's ghost over the course of Summer 17. She tells him that she thought he had left and he simply replies, "I don't think I can." Given that, back in 2022, Plec's My So-Called Company and Universal Television acquired the rights to both We Were Liars and Lockhart's prequel novel, Family of Liars —which centers on 17-year-old Carrie's life on Beechwood—it seems like this cliffhanger may be setting us up for a Season 2 that will delve into the Sinclair family's past. But we're just going to have to wait and see.
Scotsman
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
We Were Liars: what time is it out on Prime Video
Prime Video has sorted out your next binge watch with We Were Liars 👀 Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... We Were Liars is set to make its debut on Prime Video. It is based on a bestselling book of the same name. But when will it be released on streaming? A moody summer thriller is set to land on Prime Video in just a few hours. We Were Liars looks like it might kill more than just your planned watch list this week. Based on a best-selling book of the same name by E. Lockhart, the show boasts talent that worked on The Vampire Diaries and Roswell, New Mexico. It might just scratch the itch for a bingeable mystery series. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad But when exactly will the show be released and what can you expect? Here's all you need to know: When does We Were Liars release on Prime Video? We Were Liars releases on Prime Video on June 18 | Jessie Redmond/ Prime Video The show is set to land on streaming tomorrow (June 18), so book fans and people intrigued by the trailer don't have much longer to wait. Prime Video tends to release new episodes and shows at around 8am GMT for UK audiences - which is 3am ET/ 12am PT. All eight episodes of the show are set to be released at once. It means you don't have to worry about waiting to find out what happens - you can binge it all in one go, if you are so inclined. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad What to expect from We Were Liars? The synopsis for the show reads: ''We Were Liars' follows Cadence Sinclair Eastman and her tight-knit inner circle, nicknamed the Liars, during their summer escapades on her grandfather's New England private island. 'The Sinclairs are American royalty—known for their good looks, old money, and enviable bond—but after a mysterious accident changes Cadence's life forever, everyone, including her beloved Liars, seems to have something to hide.' Emily Alyn Lind leads the cast as Cadence Sinclair Eastman. Are you planning to watch, let me know by email: .
