Carrie-Anne Moss in ‘Yaga,’ Kat Sandler’s new supernatural mystery miniseries.Supplied
By the pricking of Hudson Williams’s bum, something wicked this way comes.
Yaga, Kat Sandler’s new supernatural mystery miniseries for Crave, premieres with two half-hour episodes on Friday. This show is like a witchy, extended X-Files episode crossed with elements of Furious, Hulu’s female-rage cat-and-mouse cop show.
But it’s also got plenty of something that Crave has rediscovered through Heated Rivalry sells Canadian content like nothing else – sex.
That hot hockey romance’s rising heartthrob Williams plays two supporting roles in Yaga: Henry Park, a billionaire’s son who has gone missing; and Logan Casey, Henry’s lower-class roommate who looks an awful lot like him, but has a less perfect nose and patches of acne.
It only takes a couple of episodes for Williams’ prestigious posterior to be fully thrust on display in a weird and wild sex scene at a “Dark Solstice” party.
The seduction of Hudson Williams
Yaga’s main star, however, is Noah Reid, known by many as the best boyfriend ever, Patrick Brewer, on Schitt’s Creek.
Reid is lots of fun to watch playing against type as Rapp, a womanizing private investigator who works for the Park family.
He shows up in the fictional Vancouver Island town of Whittock and immediately decides the best place to search for clues is in the bedrooms of the local female population.
The only thing slowing him down in his slutty sleuthing is a good cop named Carson (Clark Backo), who he’s paired with by the local police chief. She’s seemingly straitlaced – though the frequent shots of her reading romantasy, or what’s here called “fairy smut,” suggest there is more bubbling under the surface.
During their investigation, Rapp and Carson frequently cross paths with a local professor of osteology, the study of bones, named Katherine (a mesmerizing Carrie-Anne Moss). She’s also well-versed in the cultural history associated with her scientific specialization, particularly the legend of bone-eating witch Baba Yaga.
Noah Reid and Clark Backo in ‘Yaga,’ which premieres on Crave this Friday.Supplied
And what of Yaga herself? Well, each episode begins with voice-over narration by that mythical monster of Slavic folklore reciting monologues in a Ukrainian accent, where she suggests she’s been misunderstood, along with other powerful women deemed witches. Her connection to the story is gradually revealed.
A caveat: Despite all the references to Ukraine in the show, Yaga elides the contemporary geopolitical reality of the country. The mishmash of Croatian, Czech, Polish and Russian versions of well-known Western pop songs on the soundtrack struck a bit of a sour note in that context, implying a continuous culture in that Slavic swath of the world.
Rapp is the Mulder of sorts to Carson’s Scully in this tale. He keeps having nightmarish visions, and wonders if witchcraft might have something to do with Henry’s disappearance.
Carson, on the other hand, is more convinced there is some run-of-the-mill bad behaviour by rich and entitled young men going on.
It’s fortuitous that Yaga should arrive on TV during this latest, post-Epstein crest of fury about systemic failures of the justice system regarding women and girls that’s being channeled into popular culture. The three-actor, 14-character play that the show is based on, also written by Sandler, first premiered in 2019.
‘Yaga’ resembles a witchy, extended X-Files episode crossed with elements of Hulu’s ‘Furious,’ writes J. Kelly Nestruck.Supplied
I was impressed by the way Sandler shifted mediums to act as showrunner. She fills out her original two-act narrative with foggy, fearsome imagery from the witchiest of West Coast wilderness and a perverse prince-and-pauper storyline that helps retain a hint of theatricality by having Williams play two roles.
The main place where the strain of adaptation shows is in the character of Carson, who, in Bracko’s cool performance, remains too much of a cypher for the seven of eight episodes that Crave offered up to critics in advance.
Rapp and Carson don’t quite work as dual protagonists and the show feels unbalanced at times, with Reid getting to run the table while Bracko is forced to hold her cards close to her chest.
Knowing the play, I think I understand some of the choices and compromises that were made, and am curious to see how the ending of the series converges or diverges with its source.
In the U.S., Yaga will also premiere on Friday but on AMC+, where it will fit in nicely along supernatural shows from the Anne Rice and The Walking Dead universes.
In a Canadian context, Yaga – with its sex scenes designed to appeal and repulse at the same time – made me think of that spate of Canadian kinky-disturbing films from the mid-1990s, such as Crash, Exotica, Kissed and Love and Human Remains. This is part of our cultural heritage that I’m not unhappy to see being summoned back to life on the small screen.