Crave/Christopher Lawrence
Arriving amid a crowded schedule of Halloween programming, Yaga injects some witchy themes into a small-town detective story but doesn’t distinguish itself in either regard. Awkwardly, it isn’t even the best new show set in a beleaguered Canadian coastal community, an honor that goes to Netflix’s Josh Hartnett creature feature Below.
Hired to investigate the disappearance of rich kid Henry Park (Heated Rivalry‘s Hudson Williams), private detective Rapp (Noah Reid) arrives in the town of Whittock with a chip on his shoulder. Henry is the heir to a fish processing company that employs much of the local population, and since Rapp is here to represent the Park family instead of the law, he’s immediately at odds with the cop assigned to Henry’s case, Fran Carson (Clark Backo). Disagreeing over everything from their coffee orders to their judgment of Henry’s personal life, they quickly settle into a vintage odd-couple dynamic, and not in a good way: Rapp as the flirty, overconfident, purposefully aggravating male protagonist, paired with a long-suffering female partner who secretly finds him kind of attractive. Not a promising start for a show that uses its witchcraft motif as a source of feminist commentary.
Yaga earned positive reviews in its original form as a stage play, but it seems to have lost something in translation once playwright/showrunner Kat Sandler adapted it into an eight-episode, four-hour miniseries. At the center, we have a likable actor (Reid) in an unlikable role, playing a guy who goes out of his way to irritate everyone yet is somehow so “charming” that every woman in town finds him irresistible. (An alternate possibility here is that multiple women choose to seduce and/or flirt with him to undermine his investigation, which isn’t necessarily a preferable option.) Meanwhile, Backo’s Carson is saddled with a thankless role as Rapp’s by-the-book foil, joining him in retracing Henry Park’s last moves before he went missing.
The first sign of concern is the presence of Henry’s roommate, Logan (also played by Hudson Williams), a dorky local guy whom Henry befriended because they look startlingly similar in appearance. Apparently they’ve been living together for a while in Henry’s beachside mansion, hosting expensive parties as Logan embraced his new identity as Henry’s lookalike hanger-on.
Logan’s appearance seems suspicious in itself, but Rapp is frustratingly uninterested in the repercussions of his missing person having a near-identical pal. For example, one might well consider the possibility of these two men switching places. I won’t reveal whether anything like that does take place, but it will certainly be on the mind of any genre-savvy whodunit fans in the audience.
4.0YagaLikeStrong work from Carrie-Anne MossA well-paced mystery plotDislikeUnderwhelming use of witchcraft themesThe obnoxious and low-key sexist protagonistThe dynamics of the main detective partnership
Yaga’s occult elements come into play early on, with Rapp experiencing strange visions and discovering a rooster nailed to his hotel room door. The show’s title is, of course, a reference to the Slavic fairytale of the witch Baba Yaga, and this conceit is hammered home by a Ukrainian-accented voiceover bookending each episode, offering a glimpse of Baba Yaga’s perspective on her own folklore: “I wonder why you tell stories of the wicked old witch, when no one will stay and get to know me.” Among the supporting cast, we also have Carrie-Anne Moss playing an anthropology professor with blatantly witchy undertones: an enigmatic and sexually confident older woman with long, graying hair who specializes in the study of bones.
In theory I’m thoroughly in favor of seeing Moss play a menacingly seductive bone expert (an excellent role for her), but she’s underutilized in Yaga’s procedural format. In fact, much of Yaga harks back to the kind of Halloween special we might see from a crime procedural series 20 or 30 years ago. Sandler displays a deft understanding of how to structure a mystery drama with enough plausible supporting characters and hidden motives to keep us engaged, but the caricaturish pagan imagery doesn’t exactly feel fresh.
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I doubt I’ll be alone in wishing we saw more of Hudson Williams. Some people will tune in purely because this is his first project since Heated Rivalry, but star power aside, the plot would benefit from offering more insight into Henry and Logan. During his handful of scenes, Williams gets to be flirty and amoral as Henry, while playing Logan as more of a one-note dweeb, differentiated from his doppelganger thanks to a prosthetic nose. Their penchant for debauched house parties feels reminiscent of the unpleasant rich kids of Veronica Mars, but that show had a punchier take on the detective genre — including its exploration of the power dynamics within class and gender divides. Yaga wants to engage with feminist reclamations of witchcraft tropes, but it doesn’t feel much deeper than, say, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. Nor is it very effective as a “feminist revenge fantasy” (one of Kat Sandler’s descriptors for the show), partly thanks to Rapp’s position in the lead role. In the year of Furious, I think we’ve come to expect a little more.
Although it delivers enough twists and turns to hold the audience’s attention, Yaga isn’t particularly memorable. By unfortunate coincidence, Netflix’s Below presented a more exciting story with overlapping themes earlier this month, with its depiction of wealthy landowners wielding power over a coastal town. But the more damning problem with Yaga is that Rapp and Carson aren’t much fun to root for, either individually or as partners: a rare “will they/won’t they” duo where my unshakable opinion was “please don’t.”
As Rapp uncovers more of the town’s secrets, there are hints that the finale may subvert our understanding of certain characters and their relationship with the Baba Yaga myth. The introductory episodes already invite speculation that Rapp might be starring in some sort of Wicker Man homage. However, the revelations of the final act — whatever they may turn out to be — won’t change the nature of what came before. Yaga may have been compelling on stage, but as a serialized drama it struggles to hold its own.
Premieres: Friday, Oct. 23 on AMC+ with two episodes, followed by one episode weekly
Who’s in it: Noah Reid, Clark Backo, Carrie-Anne Moss, Hudson Williams, Ezra Franky, Patrick Gilmore
Who’s behind it: Kat Sandler (writer and showrunner), David Frazee and Rachel Talalay (directors)
For fans of: Hudson Williams and Carrie-Anne Moss
Episodes watched: 7 of 8