Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Boat Story’ On Amazon Freevee, Where Two Ordinary People Try To Sell The Cocaine They Find On A Washed-Up Boat

In shows where people who aren’t drug dealers find a stash of drugs and decide to sell it themselves, it seems like these people always seem to forget two things: 1) Unloading that much cocaine isn’t quite as easy as selling it to someone on the street and 2) there will always be some bad guy coming after them, looking for his millions of dollars worth of drugs. One time we’d like them to stop and think this through for a second and then go through with it instead of being blinded by the money. Why? Because it makes too much sense. A new series on Amazon Freevee revolves around the “let’s sell these drugs ourselves!” trope, and we’re not quite sure what to think of it.

BOAT STORY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: “This is a story about a boat; a boat that washed up on a beach and changed a lot of lives,” the voice of a narrator (Ólafur Darri Ólafsson) says as the camera pans over lapping waves, windmills in the background, to show the washed-up boat.

The Gist: We see the people whose lives have been changed by that washed-up boat, but then we get a silent-movie card that says “Some Prologues Use Epilogues.” That’s when we see a kid screaming across a field, going to his friends, and urging them to come see the severed head he found in the grass.

Then we go back to the beginning of the story. Janet Campbell (Daisy Haggard) goes to her job at a factory in her North Yorkshire shore town. She works on a steel press, and when her supervisor accidentally turns the machine back on as she tries to clear a jam, she loses all the fingers on her left hand.

As she recovers and tries to get back to normal life, she tries to win a big frog stuffie at a carnival. She’s been there so much that the guy manning the booth gives it to her out of mostly pity. We then see a teenager named Alan Jeffries (Oliver Sheridan); Janet seems like she’s his mother, and she gives him the stuffie. But then his father Peter (Craig Kelly) comes by and tells Janet that she needs to respect the restraining order he filed and stay away from Alan.

Janet is on the beach with her neighbor’s dog in the early morning when she encounters Samuel Wells (Paterson Joseph), a lawyer who recently moved up from London. We see him in his old house, trying to find his family’s cat, Major Tom, but ending up leaving without him, telling the new homeowners to let him know if he turns up.

When Samuel’s Pomeranian comes back barking with blood on her fur, Samuel and Janet follow the dog to a washed up boat, with two bodies on the deck, with dozens of bricks of cocaine on board. Earlier, we saw how that ended up happening, with the cop, Mark Finch (Kyle Abdullah) boarding the boat late at night during a storm, finding lots of cocaine, and fending off the boat’s captain; Mark ends up stabbing the captain to death but is knocked over by a wave and breaks his neck.

Instead of calling the police, Samuel gets an idea: He knows someone who might buy the coke, netting them both millions of pounds. Daisy is at first not sure, but soon agrees to go along with it; they load the blow into his SUV.

Other things get set in motion by the boat washing ashore. After a former paramedic, Pat Tooh (Joanna Scanlan) calls in the boat, Mark’s boyfriend Arthur Lake (Jonas Armstrong), a fellow cop, is called into the department to hear that Mark took a boat out to intercept the drug boat without authorization. Meanwhile, in France, a kingpin called The Tailor (Tchéky Karyo) — because he’s a tailor — finds out that his shipment has disappeared. He finds this out as he pulls and slices out the tongue from an associate who talked to the wrong people.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? There seem to be a fair number of shows where two ordinary people find a cache of drugs and try to sell it themselves. But the tone of Boat Story seems to match Fargo and The Tourist, the other current series from creators Harry and Jack Williams.

Our Take: For once, we’d like someone in one of these “let’s sell these drugs ourselves!” stories to stop and think things through, and then decide to go through with it anyway. We don’t get that with Boat Story. Samuel, who was forced to move from London because he gambled away his family’s money, thinks he can just unload what looks like 200 lbs. of cocaine to someone he knows, and he convinces Janet to come along with him. Neither of them even consider how absurd the idea is, or that someone really dangerous will be looking for the drugs. They just plow forward.

Of course, without that brazen disregard for common sense, we wouldn’t have a story, so perhaps common sense isn’t the most important thing to consider here. Haggard and Joseph are pros, and they work well as two strangers who are going to become pretty close pretty quickly just based on the fact that they’re in this scheme together. And we really like the backstories both have: In Janet’s case, she’s smarting more from being kept away from Alan, whom she raised since he was a baby but never adopted, more than losing her fingers. And Samuel seems to have a lot of secrets that he’s keeping from his family that he doesn’t want revealed.

There’s so much in the way of story elements here, we were a bit disappointed that the first episode spent so much time on bloodshed. We get the tongue-cutting scene, which is fairly drawn out, but we also get an extended scene where some of The Tailor’s hired thugs wander through the police station looking for the evidence locker where the cocaine might be. Let’s just say there’s no doubt left in the viewers’ minds about whether they left carnage behind them after they left.

The police station sequence seemed to be especially egregious, with people being literally blown away left and right. Yes, there might be a purpose in showing the consequences Samuel and Janet wrought due to their decision to sell the drugs themselves, but the scene seemed almost gleefully violent, and it made us — normally not prudish when it comes to onscreen violence — cringe.

Some of the other flourishes, like the narration, the timeline jumps and the silent movie title cards, felt unnecessary; the plot and characters by themselves are compelling even if a more straightforward storytelling style were used.

Sex and Skin: None in the first episode.

Parting Shot: “Some Epilogues Use Prologues.” Back to the head, which we now know looks like Samuel’s. They’re called off by a guy in a hoodie, who picks up the suspiciously unbloody head and looks at it. When we see who it is, it looks like Samuel with a beard.

Sleeper Star: Ethan Lawrence is PC Ben Tooth, who seems to be the most clueless cop in town; he pulls over Samuel and Janet as they’re transporting the coke, looks in the back, and only notices that Janet’s neighbor’s dog is a whippet. But, he might be the last one standing after The Tailor’s thugs slaughtered everyone at the station.

Most Pilot-y Line: The scene where we’re introduced to The Tailor, and he slowly pulls out his captive’s tongue and gets ready to slice it off was, well… let’s just say we want to eat lunch after we’re done writing this and the thought of that scene makes us lose our appetite.

Our Call: STREAM IT. We’re more mixed about Boat Story than this review may make us seem. We like Haggard and Joseph, and we like the story (especially when we divorce ourselves from the common sense that would render it moot). But it’s told in such a violent and disjointed way that we’re not sure we’re going to want to keep watching.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.