How North of North’s creative team made this winter’s hottest new TV comedy in Nunavut | Canada Voices

Comedy does best in a cold room, they say – so maybe that’s why Iqaluit is such a funny place.

On a trip to the territorial capital this past spring where the new CBC/APTN/Netflix TV comedy North of North was shooting, you couldn’t throw a snowball without hitting a comedian – even off set.

The Inuk writer I got to chatting with at a colourful sports bar called the Chartroom? He sent me off into the frigid night to Google his stand-up sets online. The elder who offered up traditional teachings and my first taste of polar bear in a pavilion in Sylvia Grinnell Territorial Park? She turned out to be a regular performer at the Arctic Comedy Festival.

With North of North, co-creators and producers Stacey Aglok MacDonald and Alethea Arnaquq-Baril of Red Marrow Media have set out to capture the unique humour found everywhere in Inuit communities in a story with universal appeal that they hope has laid the groundwork for transforming Iqaluit into a major film and television hub.

Trying to describe what makes comedy distinct up North, the two Inuk women regularly erupt into flurries of shared laughter in the second-floor Frobisher Racquet Club, which has been doubling as their production office and is attached to the Iqaluit Curling Club, which they’ve temporarily transformed into a studio.

“It’s pretty raunchy,” offers Arnaquq-Baril. “A lot teasing, a lot of poking fun, a lot of laughing at ourselves and our often less-than-fortunate situation.”

Adds Aglok MacDonald: “Not that it’s not also smart, but we’re not above broad humour, that’s for sure.”

The show, which premieres on CBC, CBC Gem and APTN on Jan. 7, follows young Inuk mother Siaja (Anna Lambe, most recently seen on HBO’s True Detective: Night Country) when she decides to leave her self-absorbed husband, Ting, after he nearly leaves her to drown during a seal-hunt mishap.

Suddenly, Siaja finds herself living with her seven-year-old daughter at her mother Neevee’s (Maika Harper, Mohawk Girls) – and desperately seeking work at the local community centre ruled by Helen (Mary Lynn Rajskub, 24), who’s from the south but now firmly identifies as a northerner.

A female protagonist striking out on her own is familiar territory. But from the disapproving sea goddess Siaja locks eyes with under water, to the scenes of a grandmother and granddaughter bonding while out hunting on the land, to, yes, a ridiculously raunchy revelation in the pilot episode that would make the Farrelly brothers blush, everything feels freshly funny in North of North, much of which is shot on breathtaking location in Iqaluit’s quiet Apex neighbourhood.

“We haven’t seen this world portrayed on this level, globally, on screen, and certainly not through a comedic lens,” says executive producer Miranda de Pencier of Northwood Entertainment. “Without this sounding obnoxious, it really feels like there’s nothing else out there like it.”

North of North’s success in authentically portraying both life and laughter in the Arctic comes from the strengths of its creators, who also act as showrunners.

While Aglok MacDonald and Arnaquq-Baril worked together early in their career, the two quickly went off in separate directions – toward comedy and documentary, respectively.

They reunited as executive producers on The Grizzlies, a 2018 film directed by de Pencier based on a true story about a lacrosse team set up to combat youth suicide in Kugluktuk, Nunavut.

The decade it took to make that acclaimed Canadian film – comic in certain scenes, but heavy in subject matter – bonded all three women as collaborators.

“We came out of it really feeling like we loved working together and that we wanted to do something else together,” says Aglok MacDonald. All agreed that for their next project, Aglok MacDonald and Arnaquq-Baril would take the lead creatively – and de Pencier, a white southerner, would play a supporting role.

After tossing around ideas for shows that centred on missing and murdered Indigenous women or the residential-school system, the thought of a half-hour comedy eventually emerged as the leading contender over gin and tonics – and as a tonic to their previous project.

North of North was a quick sell to the CBC, but there wasn’t enough money at the budget-conscious public broadcaster to shoot in the actual North. Even with APTN on board as a partner, it seemed like it could only be shot in a studio in Toronto, perhaps with Sudbury exteriors standing in for Siaja’s fictional town of Ice Cove.

“We just couldn’t fathom how we could make the show as grounded and real as we wanted it to be and shoot it in a studio in the south,” recalls Arnaquq-Baril.

Luckily, Red Marrow succeeded in landing a big international co-producer: Netflix, which will start streaming the show internationally in the spring.

Not that getting those extra millions of dollars (the overall budget remains a secret) made the show simple to shoot. “It’s been the most challenging thing that I think any of us have ever done and way more challenging than we imagined,” says de Pencier.

Those challenges started with the fact there was no studio in Iqaluit – leading to the solution of renting the city curling rink, removing the ice and creating a makeshift one. (This was not uncontroversial locally and was one of the reasons Nunavut was unable to participate in the 2024 Scotties Tournament of Hearts.)

Then there were complicated logistics in getting sets into that studio. Two summers ago, during that brief window in which you can ship cargo to Iqaluit by sea, production designer Andrew Berry’s team sent up plywood, nails, screws – any materials he knew would be needed no matter what.

Once North of North’s sets were properly designed that fall, Berry’s team built them in Toronto – much more cost-effective than flying up raw materials or crews to Iqaluit, despite having to transport them north after disassembling them. They were taken apart in such a way that they could be shaped into pallets that would fit exactly into the fuselage of a single 737 plane load. “We filled it absolutely full. They wouldn’t be able to fit an extra bag of chips in there,” says Berry.

North of North’s costuming was a whole other kettle of fish, as dress is often closely related to personal history in Inuit culture and even a particular fur trim can give clue to character.

Emmy Award-winning designer Debra Hanson (Schitt’s Creek) and her Toronto-based costume team worked with makers and builders who lived in Winnipeg, Alaska and all across the Arctic. Many got involved via the contacts of Inuk artist Keenan (Nooks) Lindell, who is from Arviat, Nunavut, and one of many northern collaborators and trainees who worked on every level of the production. (Lindell’s second cousin, for instance, created Siaja’s stunning sealskin kamiks.)

Some of the Inuk artisans and artists who worked on the show don’t live on telephone networks and had to receive messages through Instagram whenever they found an internet spot. Some pieces had to be shipped to Toronto for alterations – with delays due to blizzards not being uncommon in that process – then shipped back up North for filming.

Lack of snow, ironically, was also a problem for North of North: A huge blizzard that arrived right before production seemed like a blessing until a flash melt came not long after, making continuity a complicated headache for exterior scenes. “I did not think we would have to truck in snow,” says Aglok MacDonald. ”We thought we really safely planned, but it was the warmest winter on record.”

North of North’s invented Ice Cove setting may seem like a break with the importance the creators place on authenticity in everything from soapstone sculptures (a local carver was hired to make them) to traditional tattoos (Lambe designed her own kakiniit for Siaja and they were painted on each day). But the fabricated locale came out of a desire to draw on the experience of the Nunavut communities where they grew up.

Arnaquq-Baril is from Iqaluit, which now has more than 8,000 residents; Aglok MacDonald, who describes that as a “big bustling city,” was born and raised in Kugluktuk, a more isolated community of 1,200 people.

The pair wanted the setting of North of North to be large enough to have a restaurant where characters could congregate – but small and remote enough to emphasize the extra difficulties Siaja would face in leaving her husband, and so everyone could get around on skidoos, snowmobiles and ATVs.

“We wanted to be able to pull freely from both realities and use them to tell the story that we wanted to tell you without having Inuit being like, ‘That’s not accurate. That wouldn’t happen!’” says Aglok MacDonald.

Arnaquq-Baril chimes in with her prepared response to any such questioning: “Yes, it can! Because this is a fictional community.”

Both admit to feeling the pressure of respectful representation on such a high-profile project given the problematic history of depicting Inuit on screens – which started at the very inception of film documentary as a genre with 1922’s Nanook of the North. (As it happens, lead actor Lambe is a descendent of its director, Robert J. Flaherty, on her mother’s side.)

But the women also feel the desire to challenge their communities with their work, go against expectations, push boundaries, and dive into topics and conversations that are muted or taboo.

“We’re not a monolith people; we are very diverse from community to community – and Inuit span all regions of Arctic Canada, not just Nunavut,” says Aglok MacDonald. “We definitely want everybody to see themselves a little bit no matter where they’re from, including Indigenous people that aren’t Inuit.”

The key of course is for there to be more and more Inuit-led production in the North – and Red Marrow has been using the momentum of North of North to build a proper studio near the Nunavut Brewing Company for $4-million, which could potentially make the town a major film and TV hub when it opens.

That will free up the curling rink – which is a skate park in the summer and where locals vote during elections – but means the legacy of the show is secure even if it isn’t green-lit for a second season. (Which seems impossible, having now screened the first three episodes; the charming and genuinely funny show seems destined to be the biggest TV comedy hit out of Canada since Schitt’s Creek.)

“We want a space, not just to make our show, but to make it available to others, to have the space that we wish we had 20 years ago when we started,” says Arnaquq-Baril. There are plenty of funny folks up North who will be lined up for that opportunity.

The writer travelled to visit the Iqaluit set of North of North on a press trip.