(courtesy Netflix)
Figuring who you really are, and what you actually want out of life, is no easy thing.
Oh, we are promised it is; 21st century self-help/wellness orthodoxy tomes and TV programs and speakers sell self actualisation like it’s as easy as walking into a supermarket and buy a bumper box of breakfast cereal, but the truth is, digging down into your soul, figuring out the fake from the authentic and turning that into some sort of meaningfully happy lived experience is not an easy thing to pull off.
Just as Siaja Kudlak (Anna Lambe), a young Inunk woman from the Nunavut town of Ice Cove who in season one of North of North ———- SPOILER ALERT !!!!! ———- walked away from her deeply unfulfilling marriage to the town’s golden boy, moved back in, along with her daughter Bun (Keira Belle Cooper), into her mother Neevee’s (Maika Harper) home/shop, met her father Alistair (Jay Ryan), who only found she existed well after the fact, and tried to forge some sort of career independent of others’ expectations about the kind of person she should be.
That’s a lot to pack into an epiphanic and very funny eight episodes, and while Siaja makes some great strides, with besties, free-spirited, beer-drinking Millie (Zorga Qaunaq) and queer Māori man Colin (Bailey Poching) who work with her at the local community centre, by her side and her boss, Helen May-Qaqsuk (Mary Lynn Rajskub) alternately hindering and helping her, it’s not an easy road and certainly not remotely close to what the Hollywood version of life has promised her and many others.
It also doesn’t help when you are dependent on funding for a host of community initiatives on a government which while it might be a shining example of Inuk self-rule is still dealing with the lingering, hampering vestiges of white colonial rule.
But Siaja is a golden ray of sunshine, an indefatigable soul who may see all the obstacles and challenges and looming problems crowding the road ahead but who dares to ask “why not? and plough on anyway; as Millie says to her one day, the thing she loves about Siaja is that she leaps and then figures out how to get down and stick the landing as she falls.
While that might seem reckless to more cautious souls, it’s actually the thing that attracts people to Siaja, and while things don’t always go to plan ———- SPOILER ALERT !!!!! ———- with an episode seeing her attempt to stage an Inuk mask dance for ocean liner tourists going messily awry while in another her bid to generate a good news story by delivering ice for drinking to the elders of Ice Cove goes diarrhearically catastrophic, Siaja somehow finds a silver lining, lands on her feet and keeps going.
The rest of us might pack it in but not Siaja and it’s what makes North of North‘s second reason even more ebulliently upbeat and hilariously chaotic than the first.
The thing with ambitious goodhearted souls like Siaja is that they don’t always get everything right and their lives are a haphazard experiment in doing something good in this shitshow we call life, but good lord, it’s better than simply giving in and doing nothing.
Where the Helens of this world might see a reason not to do something – although to be fair, she backs Siaja more often than she doesn’t and says to Neevee at one crucial point in the season that Siaja is more valuable top her and a host of others than she realises – Siaja sees a reason to sally forth, and when it works, oh it gloriously works.
Take the Winter Ball that fills the final two to three episodes of the eight-episode run – by any yardstick, staging it is a HUGE ask, with grants to be obtained from the territorial government, a world-renowned Inuk musician to book, and a thick yellow folder of things to be done from catering to decorations to getting up and celebrating.
It’s a LOT but it fazes Siaja not one bit, and even when a huge storm blows in on the night of the ball, she rallies and organises Skidoos to ferry the elders to the community centre, Jeffrey (Jimmy Karetak), the operator of the local rubbish dump, to fix the generator and Millie and Colin to take care of a thousand other sundry details.
If this all sounds all Pollyanna and very little Wednesday (from The Addams Family) the consider that in the middle of all these reaching-for-the-stars moments, Siaja deals with a lot of self doubt, the stress of not having her own home or set career, and in a couple of key episodes near the end, has to deal with ———- SPOILER ALERT !!!!! ———- the fallout from a clumsily well-intentioned attempt to connect with her old sister Olivia (Kesha Allurut), whom her mother gave up as a baby, going horribly wrong, leaving Siaja in a funk so deep that all of Ice Cove, including those closest to her afraid she might never bounce back.
She does, of course, and just in time to ———- SPOILER ALERT !!!!! ———- finally lock lips with Cree/Inuk man Kuuk (Braeden Clarke) at the winter ball which proves to be resounding success, garnering Siaja a promotion to community events organiser from a grateful Helen, but what is wonderful about North of North is that for all its oddball characters, quirky humour and sidelong glances at the mess colonialism has caused the Inuk, it has a huge beating heart, much of which belongs to Siaja who in this season is allowed to be upbeat but flawed, ambitious but sometimes beaten down, excited but sadly pessimistic at times.
That’s the beauty of this delightful, emotionally resonant slice of sitcom perfection – it’s laugh-out-loud funny which is what you expect a comedy to deliver but it’s deeply heartfelt, character-rich. thoughtful and gently political but best of all, it gives us a lovable protagonist in Siaja who shoots for the sun and often sticks the landing but who is flawed and human and well, real, and that is probably the greatest gift of this lovely sitcom with substance, hilarity and heart.
North of North streams on Netflix.