📺 A new Marvel series, a Netflix binge, and more

Reviews of The Waterfront (Netflix), Countdown (Prime Video), Smoke (Apple TV+), and Ironheart (Disney+). Plus, our weekly watchlist.

Happy Thursday. If you’re on the east coast, you’re probably inside right now, basking in the artificial cool of your air conditioner and debating what to watch. (Us too). This week brings new seasons of The Bear and Squid Game, along with a fair number of crime dramas that may or may not be worth your time.

In today’s edition:
Weekly Watchlist
The Waterfront (Netflix)
Countdown (Prime Video)
Smoke (Apple TV+)
Ironheart (Disney+)

— Jess Spoll and Jenni Cullen

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Below is a selection of new shows and movies premiering this week on streaming. Our unabridged list of June releases, including 4 more movies and shows premiering this week, is available for premium subscribers.

• The Actor* (Movie) — A New York actor (André Holland) with amnesia in 1950s Ohio becomes stranded in a mysterious small town and struggles to get back home and reclaim his life and identity.
  Watch on Hulu: June 30 (*Streaming Premiere)

• Squid Game (Season 3) — Seong Gi-hun and the Front Man face off one last time in the final chapter of Netflix’s blockbuster survival series.
  Watch on Netflix: June 27 (all 6 episodes)

• Smoke (Limited Series) — From Dennis Lehane (Black Bird) comes this thriller starring Taron Egerton about an investigator and a detective working to stop two serial arsonists.
  Watch on Apple TV+: June 27 (2 of 9 episodes, then weekly)

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Our thoughts on brand new streaming content, and where you can watch.

The Waterfront

Photo: Netflix

Keywords: crime drama, coastal, soapy
Watch if you like: Bloodlines, Ozark, Dawson’s Creek
Jenni’s Rating: 2.5/5 ⭐

Dawson’s Creek and Scream creator Kevin Williamson has returned to television with The Waterfront, a glossy family-drama-meets-thriller set in a fictional coastal town. The series follows the once-powerful Buckley family as their fishing empire in North Carolina crumbles, pushing them into a web of secrets, crime, and betrayal as they desperately try to reclaim their legacy.

Soapy and melodramatic in a way that befits a summer binge, The Waterfront is compulsively watchable, if not especially well-crafted. It is visually polished in the way of many of Williamson’s shows, with glamorous actors and stylish settings. But beneath the surface, there’s little substance. The show dabbles with rich family drama but rarely commits, opting instead for over-the-top twists and shock endings that substitute for real emotional stakes.

Halfway into the season, none of the Buckleys have enough depth or distinctiveness to really root for. The setup of The Waterfront—a family melodrama with criminal intrigue—has potential, but so far the characters and their connective tissue feel too thin to make the chaos truly compelling.

— Jenni

Length: 50-min runtime, 1 season / 8 episodes
Watch on: Netflix

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Countdown

Photo: Prime Video

Keywords: detective drama, procedural, action
Watch if you like: Chicago P.D., NCIS: Los Angeles, 24
Jess’s Rating: 1.5/5 ⭐

Derek Haas has built a career on adrenaline-fueled network dramas (Chicago Fire, Chicago P.D., Chicago Med), so it follows that his first streaming outing feels like a network transplant from 2008. Countdown kicks off with the murder of a Homeland Security Agent (bafflingly played by Milo Ventimiglia), and the rest of the series unfolds procedural-style, with a joint LAPD-FBI task force chasing various leads throughout Los Angeles to stop an impending crisis.

Rather than develop the sense of urgency that you might expect given its title, the series mostly delivers endless neighborhood-hopping, punctuated by oversized location title cards. As is the case with a large swath of network procedurals, it all feels aggressively generic, with repetitive, exposition-heavy dialogue and a team of agents who each fit neatly into detective-drama archetypes (antisocial hacker, reckless cowboy, stoic team leader, and so on). For a show built around a looming, large-scale disaster, the stakes feel oddly low.

Countdown isn’t unwatchable—some may find comfort in its familiarity and ease—but it is numbingly familiar. It might fill the gap between seasons of better dad thrillers, but it’s hard to justify committing to this one.

— Jess

Length: 45-min runtime, 1 season / 13 episodes (3 available now, new on Wednesdays)
Watch on: Prime Video

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Smoke

Photo: Apple TV+

Keywords: crime, drama, miniseries
Watch if you like: Black Bird, Firebug, Mare of Easttown
Jenni’s Rating: 3/5 ⭐

Smoke, a new series inspired by the true crime podcast Firebug, pairs a detective and an ex-firefighter as they track down two serial arsonists plaguing the Pacific Northwest. Taron Egerton and Jurnee Smollett star as the duo caught in the slow, smoldering build of a case that threatens to spiral out of control.