Wynonna Earp: Vengeance from Purgatory
Canadian television is sometimes an exercise in patience and persistence. Wynonna Earp, based on Beau Smith's IDW comic book series, arguably encompasses this better than most shows. Canada's home for Wynonna Earp shifted from CHCH in its first season to Space/CTV Sci-Fi Channel for its next three seasons, while Syfy aired the four seasons in the US. A two-year interruption after the third season was caused by financial instability at IDW Media Holdings, whose subsidiary IDW Entertainment produces the series along with SEVEN24 Films. Cineflix Studios became Earp's co-producer and international distributor in 2019, with Crave coming on-board to secure a fourth season.
Despite the setbacks, Wynonna Earp's fan-base saw the show earn People's Choice Awards in 2018 and 2020 for Best Sci-Fi/Fantasy Show. The show also earned a Cogeco Fund Audience Choice Award at the Canadian Screen Awards in 2022, with actors Melanie Scrofano (2021), Katherine Barrell (2020) and Dominique Provost-Chalkley (2019) winning the award for Earp in previous years. That and other awards, as well as the fans (Earpers) taking out billboards at Times Square during the show's two-year purgatory, secured Wynonna Earp’s reputation in being a fan-favourite and its ability for resilience. Wynonna Earp's newest special, Vengeance, premiered September 13, 2024 through Tubi, the Audible audio project Tales from Purgatory following on October 17, 2024 through Audible.
The Unlikely Fan Posse
Emily Andras, the show’s creator, also a screenwriter and producer, underlines the ability of genre shows like Wynonna Earp to reach under-served audiences, including the female and 2SLGBTQ+ audiences. "[Earp] has sort of resonated with people who don't always see themselves represented in genre, and it's kind of an unusual sci-fi audience who have adopted it as their own," with adoption leading eventually to the formation of dedicated fan conventions. "We have Earp conventions all over the world. We have one in Calgary at the beginning of October. We've had them in Brazil, Italy, Los Angeles, New York, Columbus, all over North America because it is a community where members have kind of found one another. There's been friendships in the fandom and marriages and births and what have you."
"We, as a cast and crew, are quite engaged with the fandom. I think we're just part of our special sauce," Andras says about Wynonna Earp’s relationship with social media. "We're very accessible on social media. We used to do live-tweets of this show. They know they can talk to us, ask for more. We're just lucky that they've been so vocal. The fan conventions haven't stopped since we finished three years ago." Executive producer/SEVEN24 managing partner Jordy Randall adds that “[the Earpers are] used to this on-again, off-again, but the great thing about the Earpers is that they are so excited to have new material. That's really what drives them, I think, is more 'can't wait' as opposed to being angry.”
Vengeance in Sight
"The show is still quintessentially Canadian," notes Andras on Wynonna Earp maintaining its Canadian credentials despite the shift in US and Canadian platforms to Tubi for Vengeance. "It's a ten out of ten Canadian production...so we were eligible for tax credits which we could not make the show without." As to how the constant moves have affected the show, "it's been wild moving from one network to the next...I think we were very lucky because these network shifts never really changed the tenor or the tone or the content of the show. Nobody ever gave us notes and said, 'well, now it has to be in space' or 'now it has to be in Nova Scotia.'"
Andras brings up Tubi's wanting a new jumping-on point for Vengeance: "They really want it to gain new fans so you do not need the burden of a spreadsheet of all the mythology from four seasons of the series."
“Tubi's the driver behind [Vengeance] being able to happen,” explains Randall on the lack of a Canadian streaming/broadcast partner for Vengeance. “We have to respect that Tubi is available in Canada, so we need a partner who may not find [Tubi] as competition, or can co-exist in a positive way with what will be on Tubi...bottom line is, we want to make sure all four seasons and Vengeance are available to Canadians [in the future] and hopefully in multiple ways.”
Calling an Audible in Purgatory
“The idea of the Audible project,” Jordy Randall explains about Tales from Purgatory, “probably even preceded conversations about Vengeance. The Audible project picks up creatively after season four and so we thought, while we were trying to find another opportunity for Wynonna Earp on TV screens, this was an opportunity that came up in the interim. It's serendipitously worked out...as you have not just Vengeance, but a whole new Audible thing that people didn't see coming.”
As for the advantage of the audio format, Randall says, “anything is possible creatively because on the show, we're limited by our resources and our budget in terms of what things we can do, what we can see, and what special effects we can afford...whereas with [Tales from Purgatory], the writers could write whatever they wanted, because it wasn't going to change the ability to make it.”
The Earper Family Legacy
Emily Andras is realistic about where Wynonna Earp stands in the overall television landscape. "There's no secret that television is more fragmented than ever," she says. "I think executives are recognizing that having a built-in audience already keen to see more of what you've made is...rare, right?" As to whether Wynonna Earp: Vengeance’s Tubi success could eventually lead to another season, "I would love to do more Earp if there's more of an audience for it. I would do Earp for the next thirty years!"
"What I am most proud of about the show," expresses Andras on the overall legacy, "is that I think it represents a particular Canadian experience, which is being the underdog. It's a supernatural western, but it is essentially a western that features heroes who are usually on the sidelines so we're talking about people of colour, people who are queer, people who are Indigenous. We took people usually relegated to the sidelines and made them the heroes. Working in the shadow of the juggernaut of the biggest entertainment market in the world, which is the United States, I live by that scrappy underdog code."
