The Waterfront is the mercilessly entertaining flex of a showrunner who knows exactly what he's doing.

“The Waterfront” seems unlikely to be as seismic as some of Williamson’s best-loved work, but it does have more bite than many other streaming dramas set in beach towns with surprisingly high murder rates. The dialogue is at least occasionally snappy, and McCallany and Bello make excellent sparring partners.

I found myself wishing there was more — not just more after the finale, but more in the middle to let this family live and breathe before things fell apart.

It is escapist summer nonsense with – God, I hope – no pretensions to being otherwise. Dive into the adult creek and wallow in nostalgia as the waves of absurdity sweep towards shore.

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. .... There’s enough activity that some viewers, possibly a lot of them, will dig in just to see how this thing caroms into that.

In the first few episodes of Netflix’s new drama The Waterfront, a man is tortured via shark, a woman is nearly set on fire in her suburban driveway, and a body gets dropped into an alligator-filled swamp. Yet the most remarkable thing of all is how boring it all feels.

An uninspired soap with laughably bad dialogue, The Waterfront is trying to be the new Yellowstone, but it doesn’t come close.