A sunken ship. A weird lighthouse. A search for treasure. A missing father. Teenagers with their own secret hideouts, living in a world of haves and have-nots.
Many books and TV shows have affected “Outer Banks,” ranging from the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew to the 1960s Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators juvenile mysteries to modern teen mystery TV like “Veronica Mars.” The Netflix series contains more than a little “Dawson’s Creek” DNA.
“Outer Banks,” which has four seasons on Netflix and another, last, season promised, has some clumsy moments of seriousness and flippancy, and its cast of kids appears a touch too old for the parts, as have most juvenile-led TV shows before them.
But the series is unexpectedly engrossing, and it’s the kind of scary, action-packed teen drama we haven’t seen since the CW network’s heyday.
“Outer Banks” is as if S.E. Hinton’s “Outsiders” had exchanged their angst for boat racing and studying ancient charts. And “macking” each other, as they say in the new show.
Veronica and the Goonies are all here.
“Outer Banks” is TV’s pandemic baby. The first season debuted on Netflix in April 2020, capturing viewers’ attention with its young, handsome cast and their shenanigans, such as rebelling against authority figures (many of the adults are absent or untrustworthy) and generally living the high life on North Carolina’s Outer Banks.
The island’s dividing lines between youngsters – the impoverished Pogues and the rich Kooks – are profound, despite the fact that some of the kids can travel between the two worlds. Fans of “Veronica Mars” will recognise the series’ levels of society – the impoverished kids barely making ends meet and the privileged kids with trust funds and punchable faces – as well as a caste system that existed but received little attention in the Hardy and Drew worlds. (The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew were without a doubt kooks; Nancy’s first escapade sees her thanking her “sweet” father for giving her a convertible for her birthday.)
The main characters introduced in the first season are John B. Routledge (Chase Stokes), whose father Big John disappeared months earlier in search of $400 million in gold that went down with the ship the Royal Merchant nearly 200 years earlier; Sarah Cameron (Madelyn Cline), the rich princess and daughter of wealthy businessman Ward Cameron (Charles Esten); Pope Heyward (Jonathan Daviss) as the brainy sort who spends a lot of the first season worried about his schola.
The series’ early premise revolves around Royal Merchant gold, with John B. thinking that before his father vanished, he was directing him to where the hundreds of millions can be located.
There are the kids with the aforementioned punchable looks, lead by Austin North as Topper, Sarah’s boyfriend. Drew Starkey plays Rafe, Sarah’s insane elder brother. Topper and Rafe are eerily similar to the fraternity brothers from “Animal House,” but with a contemporary twist.
Josh Pate, Jonas Pate, and Shannon Burke created “Outer Banks,” which draws inspiration from every book, television series, and film that has ever thrown a group of charming misfits against the world in search of riches and/or justice. It’s “The Goonies,” but slightly older, with acres of tanned skin and gorgeous teeth.
Speedboats and Scuba
The first season of “Outer Banks” begins and finishes with a hurricane, and it does an excellent job of emphasising the life-changing consequences of major storms, including (for the purposes of the find-the-shipwreck narrative) the tendency for risks and treasures above and below the water’s surface to be shifted.
There’s a lot of action in “Outer Banks” – fistfights, visiting frightening locations – as well as a lot of romance as John B. and Sarah succumb to the “enemies into lovers” stereotype, much to the chagrin of both Pogues and Kooks. The duo gives off Romeo and Juliet vibes. The other Pogues’ narratives may benefit from greater romance.
But John B., a charming outsider preoccupied with finding his father and proving wrong everyone who claims the older Routledge was lost at sea, and Sarah, a privileged child who’s combative and compassionate to others, have the kind of mutual connection that defined Veronica and Logan’s romance on “Veronica Mars.”
Returning to older influences, there’s speedboat racing, scuba diving, haunted house exploration, and the aforementioned enigmatic lighthouse, all of which would fit right in with the best juvenile mystery series of the twentieth century. The Pogues’ beat-up VW van is a far less elaborate rendition of Scooby Doo’s Mystery Machine. However, there is no talking dog; instead, JJ appears as a pothead to rival Shaggy.
“Outer Banks” has one disadvantage of being a popular streaming series in that the producers and showrunners understand the need of keeping the story moving, thus they do not answer the riddle of the shipwreck riches by the end of season one. I hoped to see, if not wealth for the Pogues, then greater comeuppance for the Kooks.
I haven’t seen the full series, but it appears like the little band of Pogues will be far from the Outer Banks in subsequent seasons. That trend begins as early as the end of the first season, when a few of characters depart for the Bahamas.
I’m fine with that, but removing too many ties to the show’s setting, which is rich and interesting in its poor vs. affluent plots, seems like a mistake.
But perhaps “Outer Banks” isn’t simply a location, but the shipwreck gold that the Pogues seek along the way?