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).
