Anna Lambe stars in North of North on CBC, APNT and Netflix. The series filmed in Nunavut has been renewed for a second season.jasper savage/CBC/netflix
North of North, a critically acclaimed and warm-hearted television comedy shot in the cold of Nunavut, has been renewed for a second season by Canadian networks CBC and APTN and American streaming service Netflix.
The show’s Inuk star Anna Lambe, playing a young mother named Siaja who leaves her marriage for new love and work adventures in a small Arctic town, was set to break the news on social media on Tuesday, according to the CBC.
Later in the evening, American actress Mary Lynn Rajskub, who plays a North of North character named Helen who runs the local community centre, was to mention the renewal in an appearance on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon.
Shot in a studio and on location in Iqaluit, North of North is co-created by showrunners Stacey Aglok MacDonald and Alethea Arnaquq-Baril of Red Marrow Media, which produces the series along with executive producer Miranda de Pencier’s Northwood Entertainment.
In an unusual arrangement, the half-hour comedy first premiered on both CBC and APTN on Jan. 7 – ahead of a global premiere on Netflix on April 10. The show – which required the resources of all three in order to execute an expensive and logistically complicated shoot in the North – continues to be available in Canada on CBC Gem, APTN Lumi and Netflix.
North of North was one of CBC TV’s most watched show among the 25 to 54 demographic this winter – and has been the most-watched new series on CBC Gem since the launch of the streaming platform in 2018, the public broadcaster publicist Winston Ma wrote in an e-mail, citing measurement by Adobe Analytics and Numeris TV Meter.
Once the comedy arrived on Netflix, North of North spent two weeks on the streaming service’s list of top 10 most-viewed shows around the world. It amassed 5.7 million views during that time – in what amounted to 19.1 million hours viewed in total, according to numbers released by the streamer.
While the comedy fell off the global top 10 this week, Netflix additionally pays attention to critical acclaim in its renewal decisions.
North of North has maintained a perfect 100-per-cent rating on the Tomatometer on the review-aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes – with uniformly positive reviews from American critics, including a belated one on April 23 by The New York Times praising the show’s “abundant tenderness for its characters but also surprising depth and edge.”
On Tuesday, Lambe – a rising star who was recently cast alongside Brad Pitt and J.K. Simmons in an upcoming Paramount Pictures movie called Heart of the Beast – was also nominated for outstanding lead performance in a comedy series at the Gotham TV Awards, a recent addition to the American television awards circuit.
Her four fellow nominees are Ted Danson for Netflix’s A Man on the Inside, Saagar Shaikh for the Hulu series Deli Boys, which streams on Disney+ in Canada, Benito Skinner from Prime Video’s Overcompensating, and Julio Torres from HBO’s Fantasmas.
