The series, written and directed entirely by Haigh (HBO’s Looking), is built around a handful of harrowing and occasionally spectacular set-pieces. The capturing of that brutality represents both what The North Water does best and what will prove its greatest barrier of entry. Hailing from the dark side is Colin Farrell’s Henry Drax, master harpoonist and a monster with a nearly supernatural disinterest in the norms that govern men under the yoke of civilization.Īs the Volunteer drifts north and inches closer to its ultimate goal, the crew becomes less and less tethered to the colonialist British construct of decency and even the best among them exhibit a brutality matching that of nature itself. Our main protagonist is Patrick Sumner ( Jack O’Connell), a ship’s surgeon seeking a third or fourth shot at redefinition after a military stint in India left him in disgrace and with the sort of opium addiction that fiction suggests nearly every 19th-century doctor suffered from. The crew of the Volunteer is your usual assortment of men looking to the sea as a literal escape from the more rigorous morality on land and as a metaphorical opportunity to wash away past sins. It’s a waning industry and the Volunteer, a vessel under the command of Captain Brownlee (Stephen Graham), is embarking with an ulterior motive. The series starts in 1859 with a whaling vessel staffing up for a journey to the icy waters between Greenland and Canada in search of pelts and blubber. What this means is that watching The North Water is to constantly alternate between admiring the attempt to tackle a difficult genre at all and being aware that if you’re a fan of the genre, nearly everything you’re seeing has been done before, if not always better.

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