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The Waterfront, Motorheads, and More New Shows for Your Watchlist [1]
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Date: 2025-08-07
Editor’s Note: A version of this story first appeared in The Good, the Bad, and the Elegy, a newsletter from the Daily Yonder focused on the best, and worst, in rural media, entertainment, and culture. Every other Thursday, it features reviews, retrospectives, recommendations, and more. You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article to receive future editions in your inbox.
When I was a kid, I enjoyed summer vacation watching daytime soap operas with my mom. A highlight – besides my personal favorite, “Dark Shadows” – was “The Edge of Night,” a tough-minded noir series about crime, cops, and prosecutors in a Midwestern city.
There was, of course, plenty of crime in the later nighttime soaps – hey, did you hear that somebody shot J.R.? – but a lot of those stories were set in big cities.
Nowadays on streaming services, there’s a nearly never-ending supply of edgy, crime-filled, and macabre dramas set in small towns. Three of the most interesting are playing out now. The best among these, at least in my estimation, is “The Waterfront.”
The Waterfront
An official trailer for “The Waterfront” (via Netflix on YouTube).
“The Waterfront” boasts a strong small-town soap opera pedigree: The Netflix series is helmed by Kevin Williamson, who created the teen soap classic “Dawson’s Creek” before moving on to big-screen franchises like “Scream.”
But there’s more of the DNA of “Ozark” — the hit streaming series about a big-city family caught up in small-town crime — than “Dawson’s Creek” in “The Waterfront.” The series follows the Buckley family, a multi-generation, high-profile seafood operator in Havenport, North Carolina (the series was filmed in the biggish city Wilmington as well as small towns like Carolina Beach and Southport).
Havenport as portrayed in the series is as gorgeous as the North Carolina locations and settings of “Outer Banks,” another similarly set series, and you’ll find yourself wanting to visit. You’ll also want to eat at the Buckley family’s classy seafood restaurant.
You might not want to be a member of the Buckley family, however. On the surface the leading family of the town, the Buckleys are secretly struggling financially. Patriarch Harlan (Holt McCallany) and matriarch Belle (Maria Bello) are trying to keep their restaurant and fishing boat business from going underwater. They’re not helped much by daughter Bree (“Supergirl” star Melissa Benoist), who struggles with addiction and lost custody of her child, or son Cane (Jake Weary), who extends the family tradition of getting into awful business arrangements, specifically by smuggling drugs on the family fishing boat.
None of the Buckleys make the best decisions, but that’s what we want in a small-town soap opera, right?
“The Waterfront” is slick and well-produced. The perils to the family are self-inflicted but you’re still sympathetic to them.
The show has some interesting bad guys too but none better than Topher Grace (“That 70s Show”), who comes out of the woodwork and strikes a perfect balance between amiable and threatening. The series shifts into a higher gear of lunacy when he orders his men to literally shoot a guy to pieces with a Gatling gun-style weapon. “The Waterfront” has a knack for torture and murder scenes, with one poor soul held over the side of a boat in water recently chummed to attract sharks and another victim doused by a couple buckets of jellyfish.
If you liked “Ozark,” you might feel right at home with “The Waterfront,” another series about shady people getting in over their heads with even shadier people.
The Waterfront is streaming on Netflix.
Motorheads
An official trailer for “Motorheads” (via Prime Video on YouTube).
The small town of Ironwood, the fictional setting of the Prime Video series “Motorheads,” is said to be about 40 miles outside of Pittsburgh. That feels about right for this series about a group of people who live and die by restoring and racing huge, heavy pieces of metal. This is truly a show for gearheads and, well, motorheads. There are family entanglements, teenage drama, and moments of self discovery, but a big portion of every episode is dedicated to building cars and motorcycles, racing cars and motorcycles, and rebuilding cars and motorcycles so they can race again.
Ryan Phillippe is the best-known name in the cast, as the father figure to a new generation of motorheads. He has a funky garage where the young people gravitate to work on their cars. He’s the cool uncle we all wish we had.
The most interesting character in “Motorheads” is probably Caitlyn, played by Melissa Collazo, a teenage motorhead who seems to know everything about fixing and building hot rods. Caitlyn stands out in a cast of brothers and cousins, and nobody questions that she’s the smartest of the bunch.
The series has an extraordinarily winsome cast, spread over a couple of generations. By the fourth episode, I could even figure out who was who among the large cast of bright-eyed and dark-haired young actors.
Motorheads is streaming on Prime Video.
Revival
An official trailer for “Revival” (via SYFY on YouTube).
If you prefer your small-town thrills on the supernatural side — more marauding zombies, less drug smuggling and street racing — you’ll like “Revival,” a Syfy channel series adapted from a comic book of the same name.
It’s set in the town of Wausau, Wisconsin, where Wayne Cypress (David James Elliott) is the sheriff. The focus is squarely on his daughters, Dana (played by Melanie Scrofano) and Em (Romy Weltman). The former is a sheriff’s deputy who’d like to move on to a bigger city and bigger job, while the latter is a disaffected, college-age kid.
All of their lives are disrupted on what the town comes to call “Revival Day,” when a few dozen people who had been dead come back to life. Only a few are traditional George A. Romero-type walking dead, though. Most are their normal selves, just confused about why they’re back or why they’ve been assumed dead. These “revivers” include Em. Dana hadn’t even known her sister was dead, thanks to weeks of lockdown, and now finds herself trying to cope not only with this macabre new normal but also her continuing desire to get outta town.
If you watch shows like these and “Murder in a Small Town” for the scenery, “The Waterfront” is your best bet. “Motorheads” showcases a small town but is more about that garage life, so if you’d rather see grease monkeys than scenic harbors, “Motorheads” is for you. “Revival” meanwhile leans into the more grim and grimy side of things a la “Dawn of the Dead.” Whatever your preference, these are just some of the rural and small-town series filling the streaming landscape this summer. We’ll be back with more in a future edition.
Revival airs on the cable network Syfy and is streaming on Peacock.
Keith Roysdon is a Tennessee-based writer of fiction, true crime, and pop culture. His 1984-set crime novel “THAT OCTOBER” is available now.
This article first appeared in The Good, the Bad, and the Elegy, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder focused on the best, and worst, in rural media, entertainment, and culture. Every other Thursday, it features reviews, recommendations, retrospectives, and more. Join the mailing list today to have future editions delivered straight to your inbox.
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