Review of North of North (Season 1)

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

About a year ago (at the time of typing this) I quit my job as a professional film critic to explore what was out there in the world when it came to publishing about the movies and books I wanted to see, not just what was popular in the moment. Digital media and working within it can be fun and all, but it can be grinding when you’re just chasing after all the latest trends and clicks for SEO.

I started this blog four years ago, during the pandemic, but never really took it seriously beyond the occasional post here and there about what I was up to. In 2023 I began to realize the impact this blog was having on me, and other people were reaching out about reading it, so I expanded. Once I quit my job, I decided to focus on the blog more while job hunting, as I do make a few pennies here and there from the display ads on the screen.

Television has been something I’m really catching up on during this period, as television shows require quite a bit more commitment than a movie for me. You can’t also really take a break from them somewhere in the middle of a season, as then you’ll completely lose interest or forget the entire plot. When I do that I try not to review those shows, as my review is a bit more unreliable.

I’ve been saying for the past year or two that indigenous film and television has been having a moment, and I’ve been living for it. I’ve been intentionally trying to consume more content from indigenous creators after graduate school, as I was taking coursework on native history and reading a lot of native theorists in my free time because I was specializing in settler colonialism.

So when I saw North of North available on Netflix, I knew I wanted to watch it immediately. And I did just that—the short format of the episodes made it really easy to binge watch, and I was able to finish the show by the end of the weekend.

Let’s get into the review before this intro gets too long!

An Inuk woman decides to reinvent herself after walking away from a marriage she’s dissatisfied with.

Our main character in this show is Siaja, who lives in an arctic town in the territory of Nunavut in Canada. This is where a lot of the Inuk people live in the northern portion of Canada (in Nunavut), and the town that Siaja lives in is truly the community she was born and raised within.

However, at the start of the series, we learn that she’s been in a marriage with the town’s “golden” boy who can do no wrong. Her leaving the marriage became a bit of a spectacle in the town, as it was very public and the object of a lot of people’s gossip.

But when Siaja leaves behind her marriage, she has to learn how to live on her own and also make some money in order to keep surviving in a capitalistic world. The town’s manager, Helen, who happens to be a white Canadian who grapples with what she’s saying is insensitive or not to the local population, ends up hiring Siaja.

And working with Helen isn’t exactly easy, but Siaja has to keep her chin up. It also doesn’t help that when a mysterious stranger to the town arrives, and while he’s disgustingly attractive, we learn that he’s actually Siaja’s long lost father. Turns out he has no idea that Siaja existed this entire time, and he still has some feelings for her mother.

There’s an eclectic mix of people that Siaja is going to interact with throughout the course of the first season as she tries to steady herself. While she has her daughter to take care of and make sure that she’s happy, she also clashes sometimes with her mother, who runs a general store and was a single mother of her own when she raised Siaja.

The local townspeople also provide a bit of a comedic relief as well. This show is very much a realistic comedy about Siaja’s situation and life her in the Arctic. She’s very much a woman trying to find out what her life is going to be like after leaving everything she knows, and there are definitely some down moments for her.

But because of a spiritual encounter she had at the beginning of the first season, she’s not going to give up. She believes that she can create a better future for herself where she’s happy and healthy, and, if we’re going to be honest, that’s incredibly admirable.

Overall Thoughts

I really liked this show, and while I cannot vouch for the authenticity of anything in the show (I am not an indigenous person), I enjoyed learning more about this community. I had no idea this place existed in real life, even though I’ve been wanting to learn more about Inuk communities and their history in general.

I also admire this show because it depicts indigenous people in a way where they’re living their everyday lives. Someone that interests me as an academic and writer is about how we make people different than us in television/books/film more exotic, playing up the aspects that makes them different.

But in this show, the characters are allowed to exist as they are and who they were raised to be. It’s not played up for the camera, and it feels like we’re really dropped into this world. There are some explanations for the sake of Helen and the viewer, but it’s not too overdone.

We need more television like this at the end of the day. I’m really glad I was able to watch this on Netflix, even though it’s a Canadian show and I’m living in the United States. I genuinely hope Netflix continues to invest and show these kinds of stories, even if it means a small profit loss.

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