Hollywood veteran Kevin Williamson ("Dawson's Creek," "The Vampire Diaries" and more) returns to the small screen once again with "The Waterfront," an eight-episode melodrama.

It's the story of the Buckley family, the big shots in the fictional North Carolina town of Havenport. For decades, they've owned a fishing business and a seafood restaurant — with a hefty side gig in drug running.

Dad Harlan (Holt McCallany) might have liked to leave the bad stuff behind, but he's sucked back into that world after his son Cane (Jake Weary) makes a deal with the wrong sort of people. Mom Belle (Maria Bello) has her hands in everything, as well. Only daughter Bree (Melissa Benoist) has been on the outs, but she's got a troubled history involving arson and substance abuse.

Netflix's promotional materials quote Williamson as saying the series is in part inspired by his own father, who was a fisherman the showrunner says once went to prison for conspiracy to traffic marijuana in excess of 20,000 pounds.

 This is another one of those trashy streaming shows that offers little of substance, but enough in the way of entertainment value to keep its audience interested. It's the same universe as, say, "Sirens" or "The Better Sister," to name examples from just the past month or so.

A viewing of the first four of eight "Waterfront" episodes reveals a series of cliff-hangers and otherwise dramatic endings that are perfectly calibrated to keep you watching. Williamson's credits also include the screenplays for "Scream" and "I Know What You Did Last Summer," among others, so the man knows how to keep a story feeling crisp and energized.

It's steeped in Southern coastal atmosphere to the point where you can practically feel the fog lifting off the water, to where you can almost smell the Buckleys' fish house.

The vibes are overheated: There are extramarital affairs, eruptions of sudden, crazy violence, old wounds bubbling to the surface, conspiracies planned and enacted and a lot more. Subtlety has no home here.

When it comes to the characters themselves, all the staples are there: You've got McCallany's hard-edged dad glowering at his son, a sleazy sheriff manipulating the situation with relish, a gleefully overacting Topher Grace as a drug kingpin and more.

That's all well and good, but Williamson neglects a fundamental: Even a show about awful people doing awful things needs to offer some reason to connect with its characters. "The Waterfront" obviously emanated from somewhere sincere and personal for Williamson, but on screen these are some of the most thoroughly unlikable protagonists anywhere. They're easy to hate, and given almost no real backstory, besides allusions to family financial trouble, to explain any of this.

That leaves no conclusion to be made other than that the Buckleys are bad for the sake of being bad. And that keeps the show from connecting on any sort of deeper, meaningful level, from being the sort of program that not only entertains, as far as that goes, but resonates.

It's fun, but totally insubstantial.