Kevin Williamson always knew his father’s story could make for a good TV show.

In The Waterfront, the creator draws from his own father’s life to tell the story of the Buckley family as their fishing business gets caught up in some less-than-legal trade.

“Back in the ʼ80s, my dad got into some trouble,” Williamson tells Entertainment Weekly. “He was a fisherman, and he got hooked up with some people that offered him some money to run [drugs] on his fishing boat.”

“Back then, everything was starting to change and that’s when the fishing business just sank in America, certainly on the Eastern Seaboard,” he continues. “So he was a good man who did some bad things, and he ended up paying the price for it. And he went to prison. He was in prison during my college years.”

Williamson is quick to clarify that the series — which stars Jake Weary, Melissa Benoist, Maria Bello, Rafael Silva, Danielle Campbell, and more — is “all fiction” much in the way that Dawson’s Creek was fictionalized but, as he puts it, “I still grew up on a creek filming movies in my backyard.”

When it comes to The Waterfront, it was an idea that Williamson had been thinking about for years.

“I’ve always wanted to do this,” Williamson says. “My dad said, ‘Wait till I’m dead.’ He also said to get Kevin Costner to play him, so I got one out of two.”

Instead of Costner, Holt McCallany steps into the patriarch role on the series as Harlan Buckley.

“What he doesn’t know is Holt is more like him than anyone,” Williamson says with a laugh. “It’s perfect casting.”

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This isn’t the first time Williamson has drawn inspiration from his father’s story. Joey’s (Katie Holmes) father on Dawson’s Creek goes to jail for dealing drugs, and then there’s another iconic fisherman in Williamson’s long list of credits.

“My dad was the fisherman in I Know What You Did Last Summer,” he says. “My dad has been very, very helpful in my career.”

The Waterfront premieres June 19 on Netflix.