“When people ask where I’m from, I say, ‘Think of the furthest place north you’ve ever been. Now keep going. Keep going. Yep. That’s us.”
This is Siaja, heroine of North of North, a Canadian comedy that debuted on the CBC earlier this year and is now streaming on Netflix. “Us” in this case is Ice Cove, a fictional Arctic village in Nunavut, the northernmost territory in Canada. Though the series was filmed in Nunavut’s capital, Iqaluit, the map we see when Siaja is introducing us to her world puts Ice Cove roughly on the uninhabited Prince Wales Island, about 2500 kilometers due north of Winnipeg. If this is not the most remote locale for a sitcom in TV history, that’s only because we’ve had several set in outer space, plus a few (like Gilligan’s Island) taking place far away from any trace of civilization. Ice Cove has a small airport and a rivalry with a slightly larger nearby town.
Still, you can’t blame Siaja — a vibrant woman in her 20s, played by Anna Lambe — from feeling a bit trapped in the middle of nowhere. Because of its geography and its size, and because the town is largely populated by Inuk people like Siaja, everyone is in everyone else’s business, and there isn’t a ton of room for upward mobility.
Siaja got married right out of high school to town golden boy Ting (Kelly William), and her life ever since has been about supporting Ting’s latest adventure and raising their daughter Bun (Keira Belle Cooper). She wants to get a job and carve out an identity of her own, but there aren’t many to come by. Worse, while the rest of the town loves Ting, at home he’s an overbearing traditionalist who wants no part of his wife working, and even agrees to adopt a relative’s baby without asking Siaja first. So Siaja leaves Ting, moves herself and Bun in with her free-spirited mother Neevee (Maika Harper), and attempts to convince Helen (Mary Lynn Rajskub from 24) to hire her to help run the town’s recreation programs.
It’s a small dream in a small town that’s surrounded by seemingly endless ice. And it feels appropriate to North of North, a show with the very modest goal of charming the snowpants off its viewers — a goal it achieves quickly and consistently throughout its eight-episode first season. There’s DNA in common with a wide range of classic shows — for example, think a slightly older, and vastly colder, version of Reservation Dogs, or a Northern Exposure that centered the action on its Indigenous characters. It’s not nearly as creatively adventurous — or as instantly great — as those two, but it’s an exceedingly appealing hangout comedy from the jump.
Much of this is a credit to Anna Lambe, who had a supporting role in True Detective: Night Country as Kayla Prior, the frustrated wife of Jodie Foster’s favorite deputy. She previously worked with this show’s creators, Stacey Aglok MacDonald and Alethea Arnaquq-Baril on a 2018 sports movie, The Grizzlies, also set in Nunavut(*). The two of them and director Anya Adams clearly understand her strengths as a performer. Lambe lights up the screen. More importantly, she pulls off the necessary trick for this kind of show, by keeping Siaja likable no matter how many things she’s messing up. She messes up a lot, from various assignments Helen gives her, to personal complications with town newcomers Kuuk (Braeden Clarke) and Alistair (Jay Ryan), to long-standing tensions with her mom. But you always want to root for her.
(*) And written by two of the finest Canadian imports in the TV game: Justified creator Graham Yost and Moira Walley-Beckett, who wrote the Breaking Bad installment Rolling Stone once dubbed the best episode in television history.
Between the setting and various details about Inuk culture, it’s an excellent example of the old storytelling adage about making the universal specific, and the specific universal. In the broad strokes, none of the story points of the season are things you haven’t seen dozens, if not hundreds, of times before. But because of where they’re happening, and to whom they’re happening, much of it feels new, like an episode where Helen and Siaja assemble a team to play a game of “walrus dick baseball” against their rival community. (The rules, well and thoroughly explained within the show, are too myriad and complicated to get into here.)
Sometimes, you travel someplace far away from home to have a once-in-a-lifetime experience. And sometimes, you go to a distant place and wind up discovering that other parts of the world are both different and similar to the ones you know. North of North is the latter kind of trip. It’s not reinventing television, but between its setting and its star, it carves out a welcoming space for itself.
All eight episodes of North of North are now streaming on Netflix. I’ve seen the whole season.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
