North of North: Breaking Ground in Inuit Comedy-Drama

North of North, which made its debut January 7, 2025 on CBC, CBC Gem and APTN before streaming January 8 on APTN lumi, is one of the more unique productions in Canadian television history, spanning three streaming services (CBC Gem, APTN lumi, Netflix) and two broadcast networks (CBC and APTN). Created by Alethea Arnaquq-Baril and Stacey Aglok MacDonald (Throat Song, The Grizzlies, Slash/Back) through their production company Red Marrow Media, the series’ first season follows Siaja (Anna Lambe, The Grizzlies, Trickster, True Detective: Night Country) as she establishes an independent life amid personal upheavals and a failing marriage. Arnaquq-Baril and Aglok MacDonald focus on something rarely fictionalized in Canadian television, using the half-hour comedy-drama format to showcase modern Inuit life.

Lessons Learned Behind the Scenes

In terms of North of North’s logistics, Arnaquq-Baril notes, “we learned a lot of lessons in season one, practical things, like services we'd used before on smaller productions that reach a capacity, for example, catering. There are a number of great catering options in town, but none that could handle a production of this size...so we ended up leaning on our local shawarma shop to feed a hundred people every day. We learned about the process of shutting down roads to film, which we had not had to do very often.” Adds Northwood Entertainment executive producer Miranda de Pencier, who produces the show along with Arnaquq-Baril and Aglok MacDonald, “we learned about how much it costs to ship a porta potty to the Arctic and then once it gets there, the problem is everything freezes so you need to actually shuttle people to appropriate bathrooms, which takes time off the shooting day.”

Miranda De Pencier
Miranda de Pencier, Executive Producer of North of North

“We hope it had an overall positive impact on our community,” muses Arnaquq-Baril. “There was a lot of excitement and buzz about town after we wrapped filming. I was seeing posts and text messages from people saying, ‘Oh, we miss you guys.’ Stacey and I are still in town, but they missed the energy of having a crew around [Iqaluit]. So many people took part in the show, whether they were extras or actors, or providing locations for us to film in, or services to the production.” Miranda de Pencier further states that “we were always checking with the community, both on the higher level, the mayor and the deputies, but also down to everyone we were interacting with.”

Three Worlds, One Show, Many Notes

“APTN had heard about the show,” says de Pencier on enlisting the Indigenous broadcast network after North of North’s initial greenlight at CBC. “They read a number of scripts that CBC had in development and really loved North of North, so they came on board and then we really felt like we needed a bigger streaming partner for the budget to be able to shoot in the Arctic. We went to the streamers and a number of international partners, pitched it out into the world and found [a] partner in Netflix.” The unique arrangement came with some logistical challenges regarding how the two Canadian broadcasters and the major international streamer would make sure not to get in each other’s ways in rolling the show out. “There were a lot of conversations between the networks to determine the hold-back,” de Pencier explains, and “exactly how they were gonna share information, what information at what time, but ultimately they're all working together. The show is launching at a later date on Netflix.”

Arnaquq-Baril details how they have been dealing with the three media entities (and, naturally, their accompanying production notes). “We have to be very detailed in our workflow. It takes a fair bit of management in our writing room, throughout production and also in post. Our post supervisor [Sandra Gillen] is a superstar. We're very careful in making sure we're reviewing all the network notes, being clear with each other about our plan of attack on addressing notes and then in communicating, for example, that we're making sure that each question is answered across all three networks and if there's anything that conflicts that we're communicating with all three networks on, okay, one feels this way and another feels that way and here's what we feel and it's just really collaborative.” Arnaquq-Baril is grateful that “the Canada Media Fund, the Indigenous Screen Office and Nunavut Film Development Corporation have also been integral to supporting the show and our whole careers.”

“We wouldn't be in the place to be able to make this show if we hadn't had the support of the CMF over many projects to get us to the point where we're ready to do a show of this scale.”

Alethea Arnaquq-Baril

Bringing Nunavut to a Global Stage

“Our lived experience is very much Nunavut-based,” Stacey Aglok MacDonald says on bringing North of North from concept to the screen, “so we would definitely find ourselves writing whole scenes and then sharing it and then a network or Miranda, for example, or one of the Southern writers that we were working with and in the writing room would be like ‘we don't understand this’, ‘what does this mean’ or ‘what's the context of this?’ and we're like, ‘oh, do you guys not do that? Is that not a thing for people in the South?’. We definitely found by the later episodes we're like, ‘they should know this by now if they've watched up to this episode, they should know that’...it really does feel like bringing people into our community.”

(L To R) Co ShowrunnerExec Producer Stacey Aglok MacDonald, Co ShowrunnerExec Producer Alethea Arnaquq Baril In Episode 101 Of North Of North (Courtesy Of APTN, CBC, Netflix; Photo Taken By Jasper Savage
Co-creators and Executive Producers Stacey Aglok MacDonald and Alethea Arnaquq-Baril on the set of North of North. Photo credit: Jasper Savage

Expanding on how North of North serves the Inuit audience while also attracting the prospective global market for the show, Aglok MacDonald notes, “we actually did a private screening [on December 11, 2024] for our first two episodes. There were discussions at times about certain jokes that weren't maybe being understood and we're like, ‘but the Native people will get it, this one's for the Natives’...we were like, some of them are inside jokes and that's okay, so we really tried to find that balance.” Adds Arnaquq-Baril, “we have shared experiences and so we definitely weren't trying to water things down to make them generic. It was almost the more specific we could be about our life experience, the more relatable it was to outside communities as well.” 

Crafting the Storyline

As North of North focuses on main character Siaja’s life, the storyline element is a major driver of the comedy-drama, something North of North took carefully into account, according to Arnaquq-Baril. “We wanted people to be able to drop in on any given episode and still find it entertaining...but we also wanted to have it serialized where there really is a narrative arc from beginning to end of the season and even potentially over the course of multiple seasons. We hope we've done it successfully.”

What should both a prospective Inuk and non-Inuk viewer expect from North of North? According to lead performer Anna Lambe, “for Inuit...you'll feel very represented and you'll feel really seen and excited about being portrayed in a way that we haven't been portrayed before and with layers and complexity that we don't often see, especially within a comedy format. For non-Indigenous people...even though it's a very specific story in a very specific place, so many of the themes are so universal. Even if you're not from a small community, even if you're not Indigenous, you're going to find characters that you find lovable and relatable.”


Cameron Archer
Cameron is a freelance writer currently based in Central Ontario. He contributed to the website TV, eh? from 2012 to 2013, and to the Writers Guild of Canada's print magazine Canadian Screenwriter from 2011 to 2020. As a regular fixture of Canadian Screenwriter's W File section, he interviewed screenwriters and showrunners including Floyd Kane (Diggstown), Evany Rosen and Kayla Lorette (New Eden), Marsha Greene (Mary Kills People) and Sami Khan (Transplant). Cameron has a Bachelor of Arts, Film Studies from Carleton University, and is always interested in Canadian television/media history.
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