TV Rewind: Andrew Haigh’s Nautical Drama The North Water Was Too Good to Sink (But Too Dense to Float)

Editor’s Note: Welcome to our TV Rewind column! The Paste writers are diving into the streaming catalogue to discuss some of our favorite classic series as well as great shows we’re watching for the first time. Come relive your TV past with us, or discover what should be your next binge watch below:

For a miniseries about Victorian whalers, Arctic survival, and the bleeding, cruel heart of man, The North Water’s arrival on streaming shores in 2021 was nothing less than unceremonious. It was expensive, it was serious, it was teeming in grit and moral unpleasantness—but despite a warm British reception at time of release, it’s clear, 2.5 years later, that it failed to make a significant splash.

But as a case study of the habits of British programming and how a show’s quality has nothing—has everything—to do with not resonating with a Peak TV-ed streaming audience, it’s nothing short of fascinating. Now that Andrew Haigh (writer and director of all five episodes) is enjoying some of his biggest buzz for All of Us Strangers, it’s worth diving into a series that was encouraged and then punished by the harsh turning tide of modern TV.

About ten years after first making a splash in the British indie scene, Jack O’Connell (Unbroken, Lady Chatterley’s Lover) starred as traumatized period-era surgeon Patrick Sumner, disgraced from a recent army campaign in India and addicted to hard medicinal spirits. The only job available to him is as a ship’s doctor on a whaling expedition, where he shares closed quarters with the repulsive harpooner Henry Drax (Colin Farrell), a drunken, slovenly man who we see murder a stranger before the ship (named Volunteer) even leaves the harbor.

Neither man knows, however, that the ship will never return to shore—Captain Brownlee (Stephen Graham) has arranged with the wealthy owner Baxter (Tom Courtenay) to sink the ship as part of an insurance scam. Wouldn’t you know it, soon the ship is taken by violence and dissent, forcing the dwindling survivors to confront man’s inherent devility on the icy Arctic plains.

If it’s not clear, The North Water is designed on a foundational level for a Prestige TV crowd that may no longer exist: It’s a period series, but filled with spit, dirt, and curses. Everyone has trauma (who didn’t back then?) and lashes out in blunt, gruesome violence. Themes of human nature versus regular nature! Who is an animal, who is a devil—is man a combination of the two? We have a reliable but unflashy actor for our protagonist and a high-caliber A-lister in an attention-grabbing supporting role, who has undergone a physical transformation that almost begs to be described as “unrecognizable.” 

Expect big sets, big effects, actually-in-the-Arctic-ocean locations (apparently the furthest north any TV drama has ever filmed), as well as cinematic lighting and immersive soundscapes that would look terrific on a cinema screen but risk appearing dim and muddy on the average television. Anecdotally, this type of show would be perfect for my Peaky Blinders-loving grandmother, but she didn’t watch past the first episode because she couldn’t actually see what was happening. The “please light TV correctly” discourse has traveled as far north as Scotland.

While it’s clear the scale and period aesthetic of The North Water would never happen were it not for Peaky Blinders’ explosion the decade before, these details all feel like red flags now that we know more about networks’ mad rush to make Prestige Streaming Hits. These shows are expensive, slow, brooding—all delightful attributes to modern drama, but are no longer unique or guarantors of quality. It is neither shocking nor confounding that The North Water enjoyed a fair share of obligatory praise before gently bubbling beneath the surface of The Sea of Streaming.

But is the show worth watching? Of course it is! Andrew Haigh cut his TV teeth on Looking and brings such a welcome tactility to his first period project; the ground is always unstable beneath our characters’ feet, the breath between them always stinks, and those who freely speak their ugly mind are more trustworthy than those who bury true intent under the surface.

Haigh is best known for his celebrated queer projects focusing on gay men (Weekend, Looking, and now All of Us Strangers) and has said he considers this series very gay. It’s evident in the bristling, uneasy intimacy between the men examining each other, huddling for warmth, and wrestling each other on land and sea. But this teeming homoeroticism is challenged by the main drama onboard the Volunteer, where a young cabin boy (Stephen McMillan) is raped by an unknown attacker, and the subsequent, homophobically-charged investigation to find the culprit is less motivated by getting justice for a victim of sexual assault and more by outcasting someone with degenerate sexual urges—only Patrick seems to consider “degenerate” to mean rapist rather than homosexual.

When carpenter McKendrick falls under suspicion for being a homosexual, he struggles to convince his interrogators that just because he’s gay doesn’t mean he would rape an adolescent boy. It’s a compelling thematic undercurrent to The North Water’s drama: even among a small group marooned in the Arctic sea, the darkest of human instincts and prejudices are still readily, forcefully replicated. Human nature is a construct enforced until the ends of the earth.

While Haigh is perfectly suited to the uneasy homosocial intrigue that takes up the first three episodes, The North Water loses its momentum once Patrick, Henry, and a few lone survivors are stranded on the Arctic tundra. Episode 4 in particular, where our survivors depart on suicide missions for help and Patrick is at his most vulnerable and isolated, is atmospheric but devoid of the tension and urgency that the preceding three episodes had in spades. For all his clear strengths, Haigh is not a genre director, and the stretches of dogged, life-threatening survival are in dire need of being shot and edited by people with experience in pushing audiences to rigorous and desperate emotional extremes.

While the show regains its footing some way into the final episode, sewing together its grander political themes with its intimate interpersonal ones, it wasn’t enough to see The North Water out with a bang. When stretched out over a couple of weeks, a fumbling of audience engagement is lethal, and this type of series is too dense to fully enjoy by binging it (source: I’ve done it twice).

As we eke out of a television production crisis and the streaming industry is currently situated somewhere around the fifth spine of the complete “Decline of the Roman Empire”, it’s clear that less shows like The North Water will make it to air. (One of them, Nautilus, was canceled by Disney+ after filming was wrapped. It was picked up by AMC, The North Water’s US distributor, to air this year.)

But it’s unclear that better versions of The North Water will replace it—while the ambition and aesthetic of similar historical dramas was undoubtedly calculated by short-sighted producers, it was on some level welcome. Audiences are now stuck between a rock and a hard place: on one side, period drama that’s unimaginative and pandering; on the other, overproduced but not ineffective prestigious fare. Andrew Haigh made a flawed but compelling nautical drama, but its muted reception may ruin our chances of getting a closer-to-perfect successor. Failed series should not damn a genre of storytelling, but these are choppy waters we sail in.

Watch on AMC+