Kevin Williamson Talks ‘The Waterfront’ Finale and Insane Childhood That Informed Netflix Series

[This story contains MAJOR spoilers from the season finale of The Waterfront.]

Kevin Williamson had a crazy childhood — and not all of it was captured on Dawson’s Creek. For starters, the creek was not shark-infested waters.

Netflix’s The Waterfront takes the drug-smuggling aspect of Williamson’s youth up a few notches. It also features a tremendous heel turn by Topher Grace (That ‘70s Show). The rest of the cast, which also includes Holt McCallany, Melissa Benoist, Jake Weary, Maria Bello and Dave Annable, among others, are quite capable as well.

The Waterfront sees the Buckleys, a successful and affluent coastal North Carolina family on the brink of losing it all, turn to drug-running. As can happen with smuggling, violence follows — a lot of violence. The biggest bang comes in the season finale; if you don’t want to be spoiled, stop reading right here.

For the rest of you, our Q&A with Williamson is below.

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Topher Grace was so good as the villain Grady—

I wrote it with him in mind, and I was hoping he would say yes. Ben [Fast], who is my partner on this [and an] executive producer of the sho, had some meetings with him, and I had met Topher over the years so I knew him from around Hollywood. Ben was like, “We need like a Topher Grace character in this role.” And I was like, “Oh my God, he would be great!”

I love taking these sort of likable, fun actors and just turning them into raging psychopaths — I think it’s a lot of fun. Netflix wanted us to keep the show very regional and Southern, and not have him be this tech guy from New York who comes in and starts drug smuggling. [Grady’s] family hails from Atlanta and they were this big, well-to-do, rich family that sort of threw him away because he was trouble. He’s clearly on the spectrum of some major crazy, and it just got worse and worse and worse. I think he got into some stock fraud and ended up in prison, and then came out having met a lot of other criminals, and he decided he had a new game plan.

Did you ever assign a specific “major crazy” diagnosis for him in your mind?

No, no. But he had inherited his grandparents’ land, and I think his family saw it as a way to get rid of him. And so he went down there and did a little opium startup.

Sometimes people die in your stuff and they’re not really dead. Scream comes to mind. Grady is definitely dead though, right?

Yeah, yeah. We’re paving the way for an equally [evil] new villain next year. If people watch [season one].

Is the plan for a villain-of-the-season?

I don’t know if there’s a villain of the season. [For a season two], we have the Parker family that will come into play. They have such a backstory with the Buckleys already.

The Parker family would become season two’s big conflict. We’ve only met Emmett [Terry Serpico] and his father. There are more Parker family members and they will prove to be equally as complicated as the Buckleys — and more dangerous than Grady could ever be. 

So Belle (Mario Bello) broke bad at the end of season one — did Cane (Jake Weary) break bad?

Cane really, he was compromised. He finally killed someone, which he didn’t plan on doing. He was trying to not cross that line. He has disposed of a body, he has watched somebody being killed, but [in the past] when it came time to pull the trigger, he couldn’t do it. In episode eight, he finally did it. So there’s no turning back for him. I do think he’s kind of on another path. But in my mind, he’s still the good guy.

I like him, too.

I like everybody. You have to in order to write them, but I think they’re all good people who have done bad things. The whole thing is: How do you pull them back to good? Once you cross the line, can you go back? Can you ever forgive him?

[The Hollywood Reporter asked actor Jake Weary the same question via email. “Did Cane break bad at the end of season one?” Here’s what he said: “When Cane is standing there with the smoking gun in his hand, I like to imagine the first thought in his mind is, ‘Holy s***, I just killed a human being,’ immediately followed by, ‘but did the right thing, you did it for everything you stand for.’ Which is his family. I’m not sure if he’s necessarily ‘breaking bad’ by killing Grady, but it does symbolize a massive paradigm shift moving forward. Cane is now capable of murder, and what does that say about his emotional fragility? Does it prove something about himself to his father that Harlan never thought was there? I think the more interesting side of it is actually Harlan’s perspective of what transpires, that maybe his own son isn’t who he thought he was.“]

[Back to Williamson for the rest of the Q&A] So, where are the Buckleys at exactly, money-wise, at the end of season one?

At the end of season one, they had broke even, and they were doing well. The problem was, as Harlan [Holt McCallany] explained it, running drugs is a drug. Just making that money; you start prospering and you see everything getting better. Quite frankly, it’s the thing that brought him back to life. It was one thing he’s really good at. And so, who would want to give that up? He’s starting to live again. But now they’re beholden to another organization, and they have to work for the Parkers. Now they have a bigger foe to deal with.

Waterfront settings are all the rage in TV series these days — it’s wealth porn. Beyond the obvious natural beauty, what makes those locations so inherently watchable?

I don’t know. I think maybe there’s a wish fulfillment to it. If you live in the middle of the country, you don’t see the ocean a lot. And I love it. I grew up on the water. I think it’s so picturesque. When you think of just like a happy place to go, I think of the water.

The reason we wanted to do this is, there’s such beauty there, but what’s under the surface? We played with the whole idea of the duality of life, and I think that happens. It’s such a beautiful setting. I personally love it. and it’s meant to be a fun show. It shouldn’t be some heady… I didn’t want to make a show that was homework. I wanted it to be watchable and fun and bingey; a summer fun show. We really tried to stay in the bingey world with the tone of the show, in the sense of humor about it also holding true to the characters. We wanted a fun show.

You’re on Netflix — do you also feel the Bloodline vibes?

It does have Bloodline vibes because of the water and — [Bloodline] was in Florida, right?

Yeah, Islamorada in the Florida Keys.

So it had a little bit of a different vibe, but it was equally as beautiful. And it did have a family at its core. Yes, there are definitely some Bloodline vibes.

Netflix describes The Waterfront as being based on “true events.” I’m told that means it’s based on your childhood. So, what the fuck happened in your childhood?

I mean, it’ll go longer than this Zoom. I’ve been through a lot — I’ve been dipped in sharks. I’ve done it all there.

You were (purposely) dunked headfirst into the ocean with sharks around you?

It was a long story. Yes, I was 10 years old — it was a silly thing. It was a prank that my uncle played on me. He was a kid, he was a punk. Once again, very good guy who just did silly — there was that one day we woke up and there were just sharks everywhere. And they had a pistol, and they were throwing chum over, and when the sharks came to the surface, they’d shoot it.

Does that kill a shark?

Well, they’d shoot it in the head for fun. It was so awful, it was just awful. I remember I wouldn’t even go to the edge and look over because I was so terrified. And the boat was (rocking). I remember my uncle said, “I’ll hold you.” And then, of course, he picked me up to held me over, like an idiot.

Jesus.

He was a kid. He turned out to be my favorite uncle.

You sure about that ranking?

He was my favorite uncle, so I loved him dearly. He’s passed.

My mom wasn’t part of this story. My dad, in the ’80s, was a fisherman. He worked on the shrimp trawler, and the business had bellied up, and so my dad had an opportunity to smuggle some marijuana…

Oh, this really happened?

Well, it was marijuana, but yeah.

At the time, we basically considered that opium.

It was in the ’80s, and he did some smuggling with some other people. He got caught, and he went to prison for a little while. Very much like if you’d — see, you didn’t watch Dawson’s Creek!

Sorry about that.

Joey’s [Katie Holmes] dad went to prison for smuggling marijuana. He was in prison, and she had to go visit him there. So, yeah, I’ve been writing about this for a while. Everybody’s like, “Oh, this is true!” I go, “Well, I wrote about it my first TV show.”

Yeah, that’s my bad. It was a pretty big show and I’m TV Editor, I should probably know that…

No, no it’s OK. [Pauses] I haven’t seen every episode.

What was your dad’s role in the smuggling operation?

He just had a boat. He was a runner. He didn’t own a beach house, he didn’t own a restaurant. That was all fiction. I really did embellish and exaggerate. You write what you know, but it always starts with a kernel of truth, same as Dawson’s Creek. That’s autobiographical, but hardly any of that happened to me.

I always talked with my dad about making this show and telling the story. He was like, “OK, go for it. Wait ‘til I’m dead, but then do it.” And then he actually said, “No, don’t wait ‘til I’m dead. I want to watch it happen.” And then, of course, he didn’t make it — but he was close. He had a huge sense of humor, kind of like Harlan does.

You’ve had some long-running franchises — Scream, Dawson’s Creek, The Vampire Diaries. But that’s not really the trend in TV these days. Do you have a max number of seasons in mind for The Waterfront?

You know, it’s interesting. This is a new landscape. Netflix is a new world to me. Streaming is a new world to me. I think, three seasons? If they wanted four…

The good news is, with a family, I feel like we have such a great cast of actors that we could explore beyond three seasons. But I went in there pitching three — that’s [Netflix’s) magic number. In the back of my head, [I was thinking], “Oh, this could go four [seasons]. It’s only eight episodes.” I mean, three seasons is one season of network [television]. I could go five seasons if it’s a success, but I’d be happy with three. Three would be a solid number.

I used to watch shows for years and years and years, and I saw every episode of CSI, but now I’m in a place where I just watched three seasons and I’m kind of done.

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The Waterfront is now streaming all episodes on Netflix.