North of North Can Do the Hard Stuff

All eight episodes of North of North season two are streaming now on Netflix.

The first season of North of North on Netflix was an invigorating discovery: a Canadian import whose lead actress, Anna Lambe, radiated joy and curiosity and whose fictional Arctic town of Ice Cove, with its entrenched traditions and myriad eccentrics, was a solid basis for sitcom high jinks. The series’ second season is invigorating, too, but in a different way, like an icy wind finding its way under your scarf, or a snowball exploding into a puff of powder on your face. These are, to be clear, good things — surprise reminds you that you’re alive! And North of North, which was a surprise out of the gate, now surprises again with a deft tonal pivot.

Stacey Aglok MacDonald and Alethea Arnaquq-Baril’s series goes in a more somber, ruminative direction in the back half of the eight new episodes premiering today on Netflix, balancing the season’s entertaining yet repetitive early episodes. The series’ rom-com nature is still there, complete with a ball where Siaja (Lambe) and her crush, Kuuk (Braeden Clarke), dress up in romantasy outfits with Indigenous touches. Its workplace-comedy nature is there, too: Siaja’s town-manager boss Helen (Mary Lynn Rajskub) is still breathtakingly out of touch with native culture, and Siaja’s friends Colin (Bailey Poching) and Millie (Zorga Quanaq) still chafe under Helen’s wacky leadership. But while the season at first feels like it can only mimic the fizzy brightness of Siaja’s personality, it gradually expands past cheery optimism and into a more complex consideration of Indigenous life in this place and at this time. Ice Cove remains a fun place to hang out, but introducing more textured interpersonal history and judgmental outside skeptics to the town helps push North of North in new directions.

Things start off somewhat concerningly, though. North of North’s first season was built around Siaja’s journey as a 20-something realizing her marriage was a bust. Those initial eight episodes tracked Siaja moving back in with her hotheaded mother, Neevee (Maika Harper), and throwing herself into her gig at the town community center, all while incorporating elements of Inuk culture to give Ice Cove a specificity of place. Siaja accidentally kissing her biological father, Jay Ryan’s Alistair, quickly established the series’ specific strain of cringe humor; the recurring appearance of Tanya Tagaq as the Inuk sea goddess Nuliajuk underscored how integral Indigenous culture would be to the series’ milieu. That’s all good stuff! It’s also all stuff that, with the exception of that accidental daddy-daughter smooch, the beginning of North of North’s second season leans on a little too much.

Premiere “I Wanna Mask Dance With Somebody,” set seven months after season one, immediately feels like a retread rather than a continuation. Once again, Siaja is struggling to prove herself to Helen by taking on a big project; once again, Siaja is yearning for Kuuk while his influencer girlfriend, Alexis (Taylor Hickson), seems to have her life far more together than Siaja does; once again, Siaja and Neevee are bickering about how to raise Siaja’s daughter, Bun (Keira Belle Cooper). All of this is amusing enough. Of course, Siaja’s event featuring Greenlandic mask dancing and geared toward new tourists in Ice Cove goes wrong, and Lambe nails the contrite line delivery: “I promise I’ll never take initiative again.” Of course, the anti-religious Neevee is furious when super-Christian elder Elisapee (Nutaaq Doreen Simmonds) suggests that her store needs to be cleansed with holy water, and Harper makes a meal out of Neevee rubbing exorcised items on her “heathen titties.” The title of the fourth episode, “Fast and Flirtatious,” basically describes the season’s first half: It’s quickly paced and focused quite a bit on Siaja and Neevee’s love lives, but it doesn’t exactly feel like a challenge for the show’s creators. 

When North of North changes course in its second half, though, it’s payoff for a subplot the series has been incrementally building throughout the rom-com high jinks: a reconsideration of Siaja and Neevee’s pasts that makes each woman see the other drastically differently. Has Neevee always been a perfect mother? Has Siaja always been a perfect daughter? No, on both counts, but until this point those questions have felt mostly like character background; now, they feel like the basis of a major familial divide. As Neevee and Siaja disagree about whether to find Neevee’s first daughter, whose father took her away from Ice Cove, North of North considers how each woman would be irrevocably altered without the other. Neevee’s alcoholic past, Siaja’s self-destructive spontaneity — neither are easy characteristics for these women to grapple with, and North of North does good by maneuvering the two into situations where they have to defend themselves and, ultimately, each other. For all of North of North’s affection for slow-burn romance and willingness to objectify Ice Cove’s hottest citizens, the Siaja-Neevee relationship is the core of the show, and the season embraces its tumultuousness and tenderness with deep feeling.

North of North is still great at a gag, like when Millie and Elisapee put together a multi-stringed corkboard of Ice Cove’s familial connections so people don’t end up paired off with hidden relatives at a speed-dating event, and its production design remains colorful and lived-in, thanks to the show filming partially on location in the island city of Iqaluit. It’s Harper, though, whose prickly, sarcastic, quietly regretful, and secretly yearning Neevee counterbalances Lambe’s Siaja in a way that expands the series’ inner world. Harper’s Neevee embodies what a lifetime in Ice Cove looks like, in varying joy and claustrophobia, in familial responsibility and proud self-possession, and she’s a consistent scene stealer. How appropriate, then, that the season ends with big changes for Neevee, choices she makes that set her on a different path from the one she was on while raising Siaja. Ice Cove is a place for anyone who wants to take a swing at a different way of life, and in that way, North of North welcomes us all home.