Freevee's 'Boat Story' is a Hollow Vessel

Boat Story is the new British crime caper from Harry and Jack Williams of The Tourist and Baptiste fame. It came out in the U.K. in November 2023, before The Tourist Season 2 dropped in early January. But no matter if you watch them in Britain or America, you’re getting 12 episodes of Williams Brothers’ darkly comic thrillers within two months. Boat Story actually suffers from dropping so closely to The Tourist, not because it’s noticeably worse, but because the Williams Bros. formula of TV thriller feels more tired if you watch more than six hours in one calendar year.

The limited series finally moves one of the Williams’ shows to English shores, weaving a bloody coastal yarn of greed and redemption across fetching Yorkshire and Humber locations. Janet (Daisy Haggard) is a former factory worker who lost a hand in a workplace accident and now lives alone in a mobile home, estranged from her stepson Alan (Oliver Sheridan) and his Jesus-loving parents.

On a gloomy British beach, she crosses paths with big-city lawyer Samuel (Paterson Joseph), who’s moved to the quiet Northern town to conceal his masses of gambling debts from his wife and daughter. He and Janet are cosmically connected when they discover a run-aground fishing boat packed with smuggled cocaine, and their choice to radically upheave their lives by selling the drugs attracts the wrong kind of attention – from police, local gangsters, and the mercurial French crime boss who owns the drugs, called The Tailor (Tchéky Karyo).

By this point in their careers, it’s clear Harry and Jack Williams take great inspiration from the Coen Brothers, with a proclivity for eclectic characters, plots propelled by vice and coincidence, and a meta-textual irreverence for conventional narrative. The problem is that these brothers lack entirely the sophistication of the Coens and seem interested solely in all the quirks and affectations of their writing rather than their sincere storytelling impulses. Another influence (with a Coens connection) is Sam Raimi’s 90s thriller A Simple Plan, which has a similar premise but the good sense to play straight the tension of ordinary regional folk dividing themselves over the burden of their motherlode. But plain, effective thrills are clearly too modest a goal for Boat Story.

Instead, we have doltish, regionally-accented criminals, the peculiar psychological impulses of violent people, and a cascading escalation of cover-ups and investigations that feels far too slick, convoluted, and detached from reality to invest in. In telling a story where the superficial twists and turns are given priority, Boat Story shirks the responsibility of telling an earnest story, saving its eagerness for hoodwinking, surprising, and titillating its audience. It’s a hollow vessel, and with an egregious six-hour runtime (this should be 100 minutes, tops) outstays its welcome before we hit halfway.

Boat Story isn’t a calamity – it’s clear the Williams Bros’ storied experience in British telly has given them sharp instincts for pacing and penning comedy (they created The Missing and won an Emmy for producing Fleabag). Haggard (Sense & Sensibility) and Joseph (Vigil) are, as always, terrific in the leads, but it never feels like we’re breaking new ground for either of them as performers – Haggard’s Back to Life cast her as a small-town pariah, and Joseph has been playing this energetic anxiety for most of his career. 

It’s not long before Boat Story undermines these strengths with bizarre story and directing choices – a bassy American narrator (The Tourist Season 1’s Ólafur Darri Ólafsson) speaks meaningless platitudes about life and stories throughout the whole series, intercut with silent movie title cards that distract rather than beckon closer. Reality is shattered in an early episode during a heist in a local police station. For starters, the body count the gunmen rack up would trigger an army-level national terror threat that never happens, but also, the sight of terrified victims unsuccessfully fleeing from graphic gunfire in an office space is upsetting in a way that does not fit with the intended tone of the show.

By the time we reach the final two episodes, Boat Story has essentially given up on its realistic crime story and feels confident in giving unsatisfactory solutions to its various threads. The sensual strangeness of The Tailor, which we see through a love affair with local baker Pat (Joanna Scanlan, largely wasted), dissipates into low-rent psychopathy; the investigation of Police Constable Ben (Ethan Lawrence) resolves in such a pointedly dull way that it reminds us how his character was done better with Helen in The Tourist; some welcome humanizing of the British criminal heavy in henchman Guy (Craig Fairbrass) feels like Boat Story’s most compelling thread until the revelation that he is fated to fade into the background.

Having watched three seasons of Williams Brothers TV, it’s clear that the formula needs shifting up. Boat Story is their weakest showrunning effort so far – full of promise but uninterested in doing anything inventive with the BBC mid-budget thriller format.

All six episodes of Boat Story are streaming free on Amazon FreeVee in the U.S. starting Tuesday, March 12, 2024.