If you took a drink every time someone on the dopey new Netflix teen mystery drama Outer Banks said the word “bro,” your binge watching would turn into binge drinking, and you probably wouldn’t make it past a handful of episodes. That might be for the best, since Outer Banks feels like a show that would have lasted half a season on The CW five or 10 years ago, with an aesthetic that throws back even further to the syndicated mystery-adventures of ’80s and ’90s TV. It’s full of cheesy scene transitions using on-screen wipes, with an old-school logo and the kind of recycled sun-kissed images that would have been plentiful on some low-budget import series.
The main bro here is John B. (Chase Stokes), who opens the first episode with some hammy narration about his three best friends, all “Pogues” who live on “the Cut,” the poor side of their island home off the coast of North Carolina. There’s J.J. (Rudy Pankow), the impulsive bro who’s always getting into trouble; Pope (Jonathan Daviss), the smart bro whose personality mainly consists of saying the phrase “merit scholarship” over and over again; and Kiara (Madison Bailey), the bro who’s a girl and is characterized solely as an object of desire for the three dudes.
With its coastal North Carolina setting and culture clash between the haves and have-nots, Outer Banks could be a next-generation Dawson’s Creek (which was set in Massachusetts but shot in North Carolina). Creators Josh Pate, Jonas Pate and Shannon Burke aren’t content with the soapy relationship drama, though, and Outer Banks becomes a meager thriller thanks to John B.’s quest to find his father, who went missing at sea months ago. That quest turns into a hunt for sunken treasure, complete with a literal X marking the spot on a map.
The whole thing has a silly Scooby-Doo feel, with its clues hidden in coded messages, mysterious hooded figures and old maritime legends. But the creators take it very seriously, trying to make John B. into a tragic figure haunted by the disappearance of his father. Instead of angst-filled, though, the frequently shirtless John B. just looks slightly dazed and confused most of the time, thanks to a performance from Stokes that’s far more fitting for a dim-witted surfer dude than a driven treasure-hunter. The other characters are similarly one-dimensional, pretty faces with very little going on under the surface.
As the season goes on, the show embraces the romantic intrigue, especially in the connection between John B. and rich girl Sarah Cameron (Madelyn Cline), daughter of the successful businessman (Nashville’s Charles Esten) who employs John B. to help out with boat maintenance. Stokes and Cline have some decent chemistry, even if the romance is abrupt and melodramatic, and it’s frustrating that the thriller aspects keep getting in the way of what could be a serviceable teen soap in the old WB mode.
The setting in North Carolina’s Outer Banks region has plenty of potential, but the overreliance on goofy invented regional slang and traditions (the fifth episode is built around a fancy annual ball at the local country club) only makes it feel more like a fictional creation and less like a real, lived-in place. The characters, too, are broadly drawn, with their silly nicknames (everyone always calls John B. by that full name, like his parents named him “Jonbee”) and their exaggerated class rivalries.
While Sarah is sympathetic enough to be a viable love interest for John B., the male rich kids are like a caricature of preppie douches, so stereotypical that they might as well be Josh Charles’ character from Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp, with his layers of multiple popped collars. There’s no more nuance from the performances than there is from the writing, and the characters are so reckless and narcissistic that it’s hard to sympathize with them, even when the Pogues are getting beat up by the rich kids for the sins of daring to be poor.
Outer Banks’ central mystery is already thin enough without having to be spread out over a 10-episode season, and the revelations that come up during the first five episodes aren’t particularly shocking or enticing. Netflix is billing the show as a “YA” series (although it’s not based on any existing source material), but it doesn’t have any insight about the lives of young people (played, of course, by actors in their 20s), and it lacks the engaging plot hooks of the best YA fiction.
The Pate brothers previously created the more genre-focused series Good vs. Evil and Surface, and they have trouble here pulling off the balance between the thriller elements and the relationship stories, ultimately succeeding at neither. If Outer Banks really were an ’00s CW show or a ’90s syndicated series, it would have a faster pace and more episodic stories, which would allow its incremental treasure hunt to find at least a few gems along the way.
Starring Chase Stokes, Rudy Pankow, Jonathan Daviss, Madison Bailey, Madelyn Cline, Austin North, Drew Starkey and Charles Esten, the 10-episode first season of Outer Banks debuts Wednesday on Netflix.