World Got You Down? Head ‘North of North.’

To be frank, things aren’t going great right now. You know, broadly. It’s a bleak time! Within that reality, today’s Netflix premiere of Black Mirror’s seventh season feels redundant. A series that offers dark reflections of how the intersections between big business, government overreach, malevolent technology, and late-stage capitalism grind us all into dust and/or turn us into selfish monsters — we get it, don’t we? There’s not much comfort there. And so, a counterprogramming suggestion: Spend some time North of North instead.

Also dropping on Netflix today, the streamer’s first original Canadian series is light where Black Mirror is heavy, hopeful where Black Mirror is pessimistic, warm where Black Mirror is cold. (Not literally, since North of North takes place in the Arctic Circle, but tonally!) Set in the fictional community of Ice Cove, Nunavut, North of North follows 26-year-old Siaja (Anna Lambe), an Inuk wife and mother who realizes how unfulfilled she is as a housewife. When Siaja decides to leave her husband, the town golden boy, in the series premiere, she becomes a local pariah — a difficult position to be in when she gets a job at the town’s community center. As she tries to navigate what she wants out of her personal and professional lives, North of North traces the other figures in her life (her mother, her daughter, the sea goddess who pops up every so often to heckle Siaja about her choices) and how they’re affected by her decisions.

With its mix of Indigenous cultural specificity, a winning coming-of-age story, and a charming ensemble, North of North is delightfully bingeable. Watching this eight-episode season is basically four hours of sustained stress relief, and for those needing a break from the world at large or Black Mirror specifically, here’s why North of North is the way to go.

John Paul from Bad Sisters, you have met your match in crappy husbands! Siaja’s husband, Ting (Kelly William), is beloved in Ice Cove for his athleticism, his hunting prowess, and his glowing smile, but no one knows how regularly he belittles Siaja. An early scene in the premiere, “Top of the World,” in which Ting drives the family SUV to work and leaves Siaja with an old snowmobile on which to transport their daughter, Bun (Keira Cooper), and a towering stack of supplies for the town’s Spring Festival, perfectly encapsulates Ting’s self-centeredness. Later in the episode, Ting calls Siaja an “embarrassment” for falling off their boat thanks to his careless acceleration toward a seal. The guy sucks.

That setup allows North of North to go down a comforting narrative path in which Siaja tries to figure out what she wants from a new relationship and realizes that she has more to offer than just being someone’s taken-advantage-of wife. The episodic beats are familiar as Siaja becomes attracted to other men around town, but the series’ dialogue is so witty and Lambe’s performance so earnest that North of North’s romances never feel like a retread. There’s a terrible night with a weirdo colonizer that brings to mind Garrett Hedlund’s episode of Reservation Dogs; a will-they, won’t-they pairing similar to Jim and Pam on The Office and Ross and Rachel on Friends; and simmering resentment from Ting that adds humorous tension to events like a baseball fundraiser with convoluted local rules. Get ready to develop a major crush on Braeden Clarke as polar-research assistant Kuuk — he’s the Ben to Siaja’s Leslie.

Not to be like, “If you missed one show featuring a heavily Indigenous cast and crew, here’s another show featuring a heavily Indigenous cast and crew to replace it,” because Native perspectives are not all the same and should not be flattened as such. However! Like the gone-too-soon Reservation Dogs and Rutherford Falls, North of North has a level of casual veracity that makes everything about it feel lived-in and genuine, from the Inuk community’s intergenerational dynamics to its dry commentary about the weather. That baseball game is played not with a bat but with a walrus penis bone; it’s tradition! A subplot about Ice Cove competing against a rival town for a polar research station gets tension from the little details North of North intersperses about the town’s challenged finances. And a conversation about the impact of residential schools between Siaja’s in-recovery mother, Neevee (Maika Harper), and Elisapee (Nutaaq Doreen Simmonds), the town’s most religious woman, is raw and powerful. Black Mirror’s speculative sci-fi wishes it could be this devastatingly intimate.

Thanks to Black Mirror’s anthology structure, it’s increasingly a venue for established TV and movie stars to drop in for an attention-grabbing one-off performance. What North of North has going for it is a sense of discovery. Aside from 24 and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia veteran Mary Lynn Rajskub, who plays Ice Cove’s amusingly high-maintenance town manager, Helen, there are a lot of unknown actors here, especially for viewers outside of the series’ Canadian home audience. There’s not a weak one in the bunch. Lambe is a fantastic center for the series, and her friction with Harper fills in years of backstory between daughter and mother. Jay Ryan pulls off a complete 180 from his malevolent-gangster work in Top of the Lake and, as polar researcher Alistair, nails the series’ self-deprecating white-guy jokes. Bailey Poching and Zorga Qaunaq are scene-stealers as Siaja’s best friends, urging her to move on from Ting and warming toward her vision for a better-funded Ice Cove. Every subgroup within Ice Cove feels distinct, even the women who gossip about Siaja and bring Ting casserole after casserole once she moves out. North of North is Siaja’s story, but her journey is interwoven with that of the town around her and the relatives, friends, and romantic prospects who populate her world. Netflix hasn’t renewed North of North yet, but spending more time in this community would be a joy — especially because there’s a hinted-at Indigenous spin on Pride and Prejudice that we simply must see come to fruition in a second season.