The U.S. audience impressed with Rutherford Falls now get a chance to enjoy a deeper Indigenous show: Mohawk Girls. Now they can watch both shows on Peacock.
Tracey Deer (Beans) created the show, which focuses on 4 young Indigenous women. Bailey (Jennifer Pudavick) is happy with Thunder. Turns out Bailey and Thunder are second cousins so she goes searching for a man, a Mohawk man. Anna (Maika Harper) comes back to the rez, short for reservation, to rediscover her paternal roots. Her father was Mohawk and her mother was white.
Caitlin (Heather White) and Zoe (Brittany LeBorgne) are friends and roommates. Caitlin struggles with self-esteem issues while obsessing over Butterhead, a guy with 2 children with different baby mothers. Zoe is a lawyer and a bit uptight who deals with her domineering mother.
The premise is that the women are on the aggressive side since there are few Mohawk men on the reservation. They live on the Kahnawake Mohawk Territory on the south shore of the St. Lawrence River across from Montréal.
The show ran in Canada on Omni and APTN from 2014-2017. You might recall that Mohawk Girls ended up on CBC and CBC Gem last summer and fall.
My friend, who knows this show better than I do, remembers a lot of coarse language. The Peacock version seems to be rather clean in terms of language.
We should also note the Canadian presence of Kawennáhere Devery Jacobs among others on Reservation Dogs from co-creator Taika Waititi (JoJo Rabbit). The program debuted yesterday on FX on Hulu in the United States and Star in Canada.
Rutherford Falls a first for Indigenous people on U.S. television
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Wynonna Earp Season 4, presumably the final season, is available in the United States on Netflix. The program ran on Syfy in the United States.
The show has an amazing chemistry with actors and people behind the camera that truly know and love each other. That chemistry and loyal fan support was part of why the show made our list of the Top 10 Canadian shows of the 2010s.
No spoilers: your humble narrator enjoyed the series finale.
If you already have gone through Season 4, you might appreciate Melanie Scrofano's footprint on SurrealEstate in front of and behind the camera. Scrofano directed 2 SurrealEstate episodes, which stars her former Wynonna Earp co-star Tim Rozon. She was on screen in Episode 3.
Danishka Esterhazy (Level 16) is directing 4 episodes.
SurrealEstate is a quiet show that is entertaining. The program runs on the CTV Sci-Fi Channel in Canada and Syfy in the United States, the same channels that showed Wynonna Earp.
Top 10 best Canadian TV shows in the 2010s
Son of a Critch, a new CBC show that hasn't even aired in Canada, now has a deal with Lionsgate for U.S. and international distribution rights. The program from Mark Critch (This Hour Has 22 Minutes) is based on his memoir, Son of a Critch: A Childish Newfoundland Memoir. Critch will play his own father on the show.
This has a similar feel to Young Drunk Punk from Bruce McCulloch, where he played the role of his father on the show.
Pretty Hard Cases has a U.S. premiere date of September 10 on IMDb TV. Meredith MacNeill and American actor Adrienne C. Moore play detectives opposite in many ways who end up being partners.
Sherry White and Tassie Cameron have put together an unusual cop show in that the crime isn't solved at the end of an episode. Season 1 has the detectives digging deeper into a case. Karen Robinson, Dean McDermott, Al Mukadam, Tara Strong, Percy Hynes White, and Katie Douglas are among the cast for the season.
We have raved about this show with good reason. A thoughtful and entertaining exercise in a detective show unlike one you have ever seen.
2021 Canadian TV upfronts highlights
Canadian presence on 2021 U.S. TV upfronts
The Lake isn't coming until 2022 but will be the first scripted Canadian Amazon Prime Video Original series. Jordan Gavaris gets to use his Canadian voice beyond a single scene in Orphan Black. The show also features American actors Julia Stiles and Madison Shamoun. Gavaris' character is back home after and wants to use the family cottage to spend more time with his daughter (Shamoun) and finds the cottage has been left to his stepsister (Stiles). The program embraces cottage country, filming in northern Ontario.
Additional Canadian cast includes Jon Dore, Natalie Lisinka, and Travis Nelson.
Other Canadian shows on Amazon are a revival of The Kids in the Hall, a docu-series All or Nothing: Toronto Maple Leafs, and LOL: Last One Laughing Canada.
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This may not technically qualify as Canadian TV: The Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman remake will be on TBS.
The remake of the Norman Lear 1970s show will star Emily Hampshire (Schitt's Creek). Hampshire will also co-write and executive produce the show along with Jacob Tierney (Letterkenny), who will serve as the showrunner.
The modern adaptation adjusts to the new reality where "a small-town woman who feels like a nobody in every aspect of her life until she suddenly becomes a 'verified' social-media somebody after her nervous breakdown goes viral."
Tierney and Hampshire know each other quite well: Tierney has cast Hampshire in 3 of his 4 full-length films as a director (not Preggoland): Twist; The Trotsky; and Good Neighbours.
CanadianCrossing.com television coverage
The CW spent 2020 running the first 2 seasons of Coroner. The U.S. network only has to work with running Season 3 of the CBC drama in 2021. The U.S. premiere of Season 3 is August 19.
Burden of Truth started Season 4 on the CW back on July 30.
Fox picked up the rights to Diggstown in January. We still have had zero information on when the network will air the show.
Every so often, we keep reminding that An Afternoon with SCTV, filmed in 2018, still has not aired on CTV and Netflix. Martin Scorsese directed the reunion. Jimmy Kimmel hosted the reunion. What are we waiting for to happen?
photo credit: Mohawk Girls
video credit: IMDb TV
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