“I always write about what I know,” Kevin Williamson, creator of the new Netflix series The Waterfront, told Tudum in June 2025. That’s an ideology he employed while creating his hit 2000s series Dawson’s Creek and Vampire Diaries, and now extends to his latest North Carolina-set show. But this series, starring Holt McCallany, Maria Bello, and Melissa Benoist, is much more personal than just centering on the location of his childhood. The Waterfront follows a failing family fishing business that is forced to smuggle drugs illegally via their boats to save their company—a storyline that mirrors Williamson’s childhood.
While Harlan Buckley (played by McCallany) is part of a deeper crime syndicate on the show, Williamson maintains his father was “a very, very good man [who] got tempted to do some things that weren’t so legal and got in some trouble.”
