Kevin Williamson knows exactly where he’s going. It’s a sunny Thursday afternoon in Wilmington, North Carolina, and the prolific creator and screenwriter walks and talks as he blazes a trail to Stage 10.
For several years in the late 1990s, Williamson walked this same studio lot every day during production on the first two seasons of his seminal teen drama Dawson’s Creek. Since then, these sound stages have been renovated, and projects like One Tree Hill and The Summer I Turned Pretty have set up shop. But for Williamson, it’s like muscle memory on set.
He’s prepping the last two Season 1 episodes of his new Netflix and Universal Television series, The Waterfront (out June 19), a family drama about the Buckleys, a North Carolina fishing dynasty that embraces drug running to survive a changing industry. The immaculate set for the Buckleys’ lavish restaurant is quiet this afternoon, a far cry from the scene in a few hours when the dozens of crew and background extras make their way over for a night shoot.
When Williamson arrives on the set, the only person around is Rafael L. Silva (911: Lone Star), who is behind the bar whipping up a cocktail under the guidance of an instructor. Silva plays Shawn, the Buckleys’ new bartender, who isn’t yet proficient in the art of a good drink, hence why Silva is still training even though production is days from wrapping. Williamson watches for a moment as Silva breezes through the ingredients before he continues to move through the immaculate set.
“I know my way around a restaurant,” he says to TV Insider, gesturing to the fictional one he cooked up in his mind. “I worked in a restaurant for so many years. A waiter and a bartender, a bus boy, a dishwasher, a cook. I’ve done all of it. Whenever my career went belly up, I knew I could always go back to working in a restaurant.”
He hasn’t had to test that theory in a long time. From Scream to The Vampire Diaries to The Following and then back to Scream, Williamson hasn’t stopped working since he was here for Dawson’s Creek nearly 30 years ago. Aside from the criminal element the Buckleys get increasingly tangled in, The Waterfront shares many similarities with Dawson’s Creek. It’s set in a charming coastal town (the fictional Havenport, North Carolina), luxuriates in the stunning views of the region, and pulls directly from Williamson’s life—maybe more than ever.
Gone Fishin’
The North Carolina native has never hidden his past from his work. He has long admitted to chipping pieces of himself off to create characters like Dawson (James Van Der Beek), the cinephile romantic at the heart of Dawson’s Creek, who shares Williamson’s own love of film.
Embedded in the story of Joey (Katie Holmes), the object of Dawson’s affection, is something more personal. Joey spoke openly about how her fisherman father was in prison for dealing drugs. It is not what she is remembered for—that would be her on-again, off-again romance with Pacey (Joshua Jackson)—but it is a part of the foundation of the character and Williamson.
Netflix
“Her dad is in prison for conspiracy to traffic marijuana in excess of 20,000 pounds,” Williamson rattles off, the exact verbiage etched into his memory. “That was my dad’s charge. That’s what put my dad in prison.”
Williamson always wanted to delve deeper into his fisherman father’s own issues with the law. He just wanted to do it respectfully and when the time was right.
The Waterfront was his chance.
“This is another side of me. This is the darker side of me,” he says. “Dawson’s Creek was sort of the coming of age, the teenage drama, the first love and all of that. I have always wanted to tell this story, too, but I wanted to wait until my dad died. I told him, ‘When you die, I’m gonna tell your story.’ He was always like, ‘Okay.’”
But when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the endless amounts of alone time created a restlessness in Williamson to start reckoning with how he would broach the subject. Eventually, he told his father, Wade, he might get to the project sooner than he expected.
“He was like, ‘Oh, I wish you had told the story a lot sooner than now. I’m not gonna be around for it,’” Williamson remembers.
He reassured his father that he would be here to see what came of it, and they even talked about who might play the role. “He wanted Kevin Costner to play him because Yellowstone was his favorite show,” Williamson reveals. “He also said, ‘I wish Robert Mitchum was still alive. I think Robert Mitchum would make a good me.’ And he’s not wrong.”
Wade died before Williamson finished writing. “He didn’t make it, but he got so close, and he would have loved it,” he says.
That’s the story Williamson tells as he sits on the restaurant’s faux outdoor patio, situated somewhere between the fiction of The Waterfront and the reality of his own life. However, he points out that his father’s contributions to the series are limited. “He’s not the show,” he notes.
Hooked On a Feeling
Audiences will instead meet Harlan Buckley (Holt McCallany), a grizzled, hard-living father and husband who can’t claim to be good at either. After a heart attack and a few affairs, he has stepped back from the family business, only to learn his heir-apparent son, Cane (Jake Weary), and his wife, Belle (Maria Bello), have resorted to drug running to keep the business afloat. Harlan decides he needs to intervene, resurfacing memories of his late father’s own history of dealing drugs through the Buckley empire.
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“This is a show about good people doing bad things,” Williamson tells TV Insider, before quickly correcting himself. “Good people forced to do some bad things.”
The weight of Havenport sits on the shoulders of Harlan, Cane, Belle and the other Buckley offspring, Bree (Melissa Benoist), whose past drug and alcohol abuse has pushed her to the fringes of the family. The Buckley name wields power in Havenport, but it comes with a price.
“They have this fishing business and this fish house, which is thriving and helps the town thrive,” Williamson says. “They have this restaurant, which employs so many people, and if it goes under, all those people lose their jobs, and all those people lose their livelihood. It has put so much pressure on them, and they’ve sort of crossed a line in their morality.”
This is where the story diverges from Williamson’s own family. They never owned a restaurant like the Buckleys. They never had a coastal North Carolina town depending on them. But as Williamson walks around these sets, he says it’s hard not to be pulled back to memories of his childhood. One in particular, the Buckleys’ fish house, is a cavernous two-story set that could be mistaken for a real fishing operation to the untrained eye.
“I saw this enormous set, and I was overwhelmed,” he says. “It got me. I had to go take a moment. It was powerful because this is my dad. I think he would be so thrilled. I’m sorry he’s not here because I think he would love to be sitting here watching Holt play him.”
Williamson first met McCallany while working on the pilot of the short-lived ABC series Wasteland in 1999. The Mindhunter alum only appeared in the first episode, but Williamson remembered him immediately when casting the man inspired by his father.
“I think Holt is the perfect version of what I think he would be even though it’s fictionalized,” he says. “He carries the swagger that my dad had. He has that sense of humor that my dad had and the dryness.”
For Cane, the son who never intended to assume the throne, Williamson cast Weary after seeing him in TNT’s Animal Kingdom. (He also appeared in an episode of Williamson’s CBS series Stalker.) After Weary’s initial audition for Cane, Williamson wasn’t convinced he was right for the role. It wasn’t until he saw him in the Jessica Alba movie Trigger Warning that he changed his mind. “He just went nuts in it, and I knew he could play this part,” Williamson recalls.
He was also a fan of Weary’s mother, Kim Zimmer, who played Reva Shayne on the CBS soap opera Guiding Light. “He’s just as alive as she was on Guiding Light,” Williamson says. “I loved her. I always find the connection to something from my childhood. Everything leads to my childhood, and I watched Guiding Light growing up.”
Bello plays the tough but practical Belle, who forges ahead in spite of Harlan’s less-than-perfect marital tendencies. Williamson fell hard for Bello’s force-of-nature presence. “I want her in everything I do now,” he says. But he also couldn’t resist indulging his love of her past work. “Just today we were talking and I asked her, ‘Will you please make Coyote Ugly 2?’”
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Williamson has long brushed shoulders with Benoist in the CW universe, but had not yet worked with her somehow. She played Supergirl under the leadership of producer Greg Berlanti, who took over for Williamson when he left Dawson’s Creek. Around here, it’s all in the TV family. “She’s just that right kind of fierce,” he says of Benoist.
Blast From the Past
But Williamson’s nostalgia isn’t just contained to the sprawling sets or a cast that has long orbited his world. Exterior filming of the Buckley family restaurant is done at Fishy Fishy, a small-town seafood staple just south of Wilmington in Southport. Right outside is where Williamson watched another one of his creations come to life—1997’s I Know What You Did Last Summer. Just a stone’s throw away from where The Waterfront filmed were the locations for the film’s July 4 parade and the gym where Ryan Phillippe‘s character is stalked by the fish hook-wielding killer—another nod to his father’s profession (fisherman, not serial killer).
While on an endless stream of calls one day, Williamson wandered town and found himself in front of, perhaps, the film’s most iconic location. “I walked around the corner, and suddenly I’m standing in front of the house where Jennifer Love Hewitt twirled around screaming, ‘What are you waiting for?’” he says. “It’s all there. It is weird being here again. It’s a little freaky.”
Despite the déjà vu, Williamson says he never considered shooting the series anywhere else. “This is about North Carolina, and it’s about my roots. It’s about a family legacy that took place right here.”
Staying Alive
The original series is one of four that Williamson and his production company, Outerbanks Entertainment, are developing under his overall deal with Universal Television. The other three are adaptations of Rear Window, The Game, and The It Girl. If that didn’t keep him busy enough, he immediately left the set of The Waterfront and started prepping to direct Scream 7, his first time in the director’s chair since 1999’s Teaching Mrs. Tingle.
“I do think I’m in a little bit of a second or third or fourth wind,” he says. “I feel like I’ve had five careers. I honestly felt like I was ready to retire, and it turned out I wasn’t. I think the pandemic changed a lot. I got so ready for something else. I was inside for too long, and I just had to do something. If you want something done, ask a busy person. I think it keeps you alive.”
He tries to find the words to sum up The Waterfront, this sprawling semi-autobiographical exploration of his past, the kind of story he’s been preparing his whole life to tell. He chooses to filter his elevator pitch through a familiar name.
“It’s like Dawson’s Creek, if everyone grew up to be criminals,” Williamson says, cracking a proud smirk.
The Waterfront, Series Premiere, June 19, Netflix
