Canadian TV is getting more ice time
Showrunner Jeff Norton tells us about bringing his YA figure skating drama Finding Her Edge to Canada, and the world, at the most opportune time.
Steamy relationships. Elite athletes battling it out on the ice. An unapologetically Canadian production.
Nope. We’re not talking about Heated Rivalry. This is Finding Her Edge, a YA drama about figure skaters that, if you squint real hard, could be that other show’s younger, more family-friendly sibling.
“Coming after Heated Rivalry and just ahead of the Olympics, we're sort of sandwiched between two cultural moments, and I think we're excited to take advantage of that and show off our show to the audience,” says Jeff Norton, Finding Her Edge’s showrunner and executive producer. The WildBrain-produced series is now streaming on Netflix in Canada and around the world, and on Radio-Canada’s ICI TOU.TV EXTRA for French-Canadian audiences.
Also worth reading: They Shoot, They Score
The fact that Finding Her Edge is based on a novel by American author Jennifer Iacopelli is about the only thing about the production that isn’t Canadian, and Iacopelli has said the story was inspired by Canadian figure skaters Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir. That, and Jane Austen’s Persuasion.
Finding Her Edge’s Canadian cast includes Madelyn Keys, Alice Malakhov and Alexandra Beaton as the Russo sisters, who were born into a figure skating dynasty. Middle sister Adriana (Keys) is the protagonist, caught in a love triangle as she trains for Worlds with her new partner Brayden (Cale Ambrozic) while still having the feels for ex-boyfriend and former skating partner Freddie (Olly Atkins).
Canadian figure skating legends Piper Gilles and Paul Poirier (better known as Piper and Paul) and Elvis Stojko all have cameos in this production that saw its share of challenges, including the demise of Family Channel, on which it was set to air, and a devastating ice storm that almost saw production in Orillia, Ontario, frozen.
Norton, whose previous credits include Geek Girl and The Small Hand, was at home in Burlington, Ontario, when we spoke by Zoom.
Finding Her Edge comes hot on the heels of the Heated Rivalry phenomenon. There are certainly differences in tone and audience but also overlap in that it’s a Canadian show about elite skaters. Does that hurt or help the show’s launch?
First of all, I'm incredibly thrilled for the entire team at Heated Rivalry, and I think what that show has done for Canadian storytelling is amazing. So, we all benefit. The second thing is, I actually think the similarities are less about skating and ice, and more about romance. Fundamentally, Finding Her Edge is a story about love, and it is a romance. And I think, even though the tone of the shows and the appropriateness in terms of its audience [differs], fundamentally, playing with romance is something that's literally tugging at the heartstrings of the audience right now.
Launching just before the Milano Cortina Olympics was intentional. Tell me about bringing everything together in time.
I'd long wanted to do a figure skating show so I'd had this book under option, but I was able to pitch it in a way which was, if we greenlight this now, and when I say now, this was back in the early autumn of ’24, we will be ready, and we'll be able to have a show for the audience simultaneously with the Winter Olympics. When people are excited about the non-fiction of the real Olympics, we'll have a fiction that peels back the curtain and takes the audience behind the scenes into this fascinating world.
Speaking of production, this project has a complicated history. Explain the relationship between Netflix, Radio-Canada’s ICI TOU.TV and WildBrain.
So the project was commissioned by Family Channel, as the Canadian commissioning broadcaster, and Netflix came in as the global partner outside of Canada initially and then, of course, the Family Channel service was shut down.… WildBrain held the distribution rights, and so what they were able to do was then find a new home in Canada for the show. That's when they got it set up with Radio-Canada for French-speaking Canada, and then Netflix for English-speaking Canada.
Aside from losing Family Channel, what are the challenges in reaching young audiences today?
Well, I see the challenges as the same as the opportunities. I think there are more and more screens vying for the attention of younger audiences, and we see it everywhere. My deeper background is as an author, I've written over a dozen Young Adult novels, and as an author I've been competing with screentime for 15 years. And so, now, creating drama for the screen, I see it as just a similar challenge. But I also think that's the opportunity, and what I mean by that is, if you have something utterly compelling people will want to watch it.
In addition to the cast and crew being Canadian, the series was shot in Ontario, much of it between Barrie and Orillia. Why that area?
I had pitched a vision for what I called a Winter Wonderland aesthetic…but I was very aware that there would be a practical risk of not being able to deliver that for the production. We started in February [2025] and there have been years around [the Greater Toronto Area] where the grass is still exposed, and that wasn't the look I was going for. And so, with Angela [Boudreault], who's the producer from WildBrain, we literally looked at a map of southern Ontario and tried to triangulate where we could go, where it would still be feasible for cast and crew, where we could also feel comfortable that we would get the type of weather we would want.
Did you get it?
Well, be careful what you wish for because we did get it, but boy, did we get it. And as you know, we had an incredibly cold winter. We had a lot of snow in Orillia. You'll see in a couple sequences the snowbanks are higher than our actors.
Then in March the area was hit with a catastrophic ice storm. How did that affect the shoot?
The place where we were all staying, we called it Winter Camp, it was the Carriage Ridge Resort, and we lost power there [for three weeks]. In a way it really brought the cast and crew together because we were literally all in the dark. Some of the crew members had propane barbecues in their pickup trucks…. Eventually, we had to move folks. A lot of us tried our best to stay close to a week and then we did have to scatter.
But you continued filming with generators?
We did continue. We didn't lose a day. I mean, we were very careful. The production team really came together and found a way to make sure that everybody was safe, but also conserving our resources. But yeah, we didn't drop a day. To be honest with you, we didn't have the room in the schedule to lose a day. We were on a critical path which would have us film a couple of days in Paris, France. We took the key cast and did walk-and-talks in France at the end of the shoot. So we were always up against that as a deadline…. Our production constraints were real, so we just had to keep going.
