“The Waterfront” has gone overboard at Netflix. The streamer has canceled the crime series, Variety has confirmed. The decision comes just over two months after its first season debuted.
Created by Kevin Williamson, “The Waterfront” centered on the Buckley family, a North Carolina fishing dynasty that starts on a slippery slope of illicit activities to save their business. The series starred Holt McCallany and Maria Bello as the Buckley spouses, along with Melissa Benoist and Jack Weary as their hard-up children. The ensemble also included Rafael L. Silva, Humberly González, Danielle Campbell and Brady Hepner.
“The Waterfront” had all eight episodes of its first season bow on June 19. The series spent over a week atop the streamer’s Top 10 before being overtaken after the premiere by the juggernaut “Squid Game,” which debuted its third season less than two weeks after.
Popular on Variety
The series earned mostly positive reviews, drawing comparisons to previous platform-defining crime hits for Netflix like “Ozark” and “Bloodline.” Variety chief TV critic Aramide Tinubu calling it a “highly bingeable family soap” and arguing that the story’s many loose ends “set itself up to be yet another one of [Williamson’s] long-running fan-favorite shows.”
Williamson had discussed plans for a potential second season, teasing a power struggle within the Buckley family dynasty in an interview about the Season 1 finale with Variety.
“I love writing about families — I think that’s what I always gravitate toward. But no one wants to write about happy people, that’s not fun. You want to write about messy people doing messy things,” Williamson said about the series. “I wanted to tell a story about this broken family that’s trying to fix itself, and why they have to do it individually and together. There’s a lot of secrets going on, and there’s a lot of resentment, there’s a lot of trauma and there’s a lot of the past poking through the cracks.”
