Miss Bridgerton? Netflix’s New Hit Rom-Com Will Scratch That Itch and More. (2025)

Netflix’s first Canadian original series is doing something totally new. It’s not just that North of North takes place in spring—the tundra flooded with bright light, the opposite of the dark, claustrophobic vision of polar-horror fare like True Detective: Night Country or 30 Days of Night. It’s the way the themes of lightness and expansion—the borderline manic feeling of freedom that comes in Arctic spring—work their way into the costume design, with bright floral accents on everyone’s parkas, boots, and sweaters, and so much unique, beautiful beaded jewelry that the show had a separate earring budget. (It’s these colors, but not only these colors, that are leading people on TikTok to compare the look and feel of North of North to the lush, green-and-pink vibe of Bridgerton.) It’s in the sparkle of the dialogue, and it’s also in the wide-open, charming face of star Anna Lambe, who has gone right from playing the angry “you’re always at work” wife of Deputy Peter in True Detective: Night Country to this much funner role.

Lambe’s Siaja (pronounced “see-ya-ya”) is a classic awkward ingénue, full of good intentions, kindness, and bright ideas that enjoy widely varying rates of success. She’s having a quarter-life crisis, having gone straight from her mother’s house into a soul-sucking marriage with local superstar Ting (Kelly William), a guy with a huge grin, tons of athletic prowess, and no capacity at all to recognize his wife as a person. After Ting’s inattentiveness causes Siaja’s near-drowning, and she meets the goddess Nuliajuk in the water, she realizes that she must do something about her life.

Hijinks—watchers of romantic comedies know—are about to ensue, and they do. At the end of the first episode, in a fever of desire to make any kind of change for herself, Siaja pulls a handsome visitor—a fiftysomething white man—out of the town’s watering hole and kisses him passionately. Soon after, we discover that this man is Siaja’s long-lost father. End of episode!

That’s the kind of awkward misstep many a yearning young woman would make in a rom-com, punched up by the kind of humorous timing many editors of such movies and television shows would employ. But North of North was filmed in Lambe’s hometown (Iqaluit, Nunavut, called “Ice Cove” in the show), and it’s a deeply small-town show with a very particular sense of place that has influenced the way the character’s life has unfolded. (Siaja to a city-dwelling outsider who expresses surprise that she’s a mom: “Of course I have a kid! I’m 26!”) Siaja’s often annoyed with the people in the town who will not recognize Ting for what he is—there’s a crew of mean girls who keep bringing casseroles to his door, in a bid to become his next miserable wife—but no matter how much she rolls her eyes, she’s never going to leave Ice Cove. Her life is there, set into patterns that are familiar to the rest of the people who surround her.

Everyone in the town knows everyone else, but as we see throughout Season 1, as Siaja takes a job at the community center, figures out how to work with the self-aggrandizing white-lady town manager Helen (a dark-side Leslie Knope, played with fine good humor by Mary Lynn Rajskub), and reconnects with her prickly mom Neevee (Maika Harper), that doesn’t mean that nobody can change. Siaja’s flirtation with kind out-of-town visitor Kuuk (Braeden Clarke), an Inuk and Cree man from a politically powerful family who’s also trying to figure out what he wants in life, widens the distance between Siaja and Ting. Siaja’s little wins—as when she bribes local kids with slushies to come brighten up the community center’s elders’ night out, and it works—have a sitcom-y satisfaction to them.

Ice Cove’s social world, though also small and sometimes frustrating in its rigidity, is far from Bridgerton’s ton, and North of North is very much unlike the many other historical romance shows that have tried for bites of Bridgerton’s biscuit since that show first got so popular, back in 2020. But one scene shows how far Shonda Rhimes’ influence has reached. In Episode 6, Siaja has a beautiful dream of herself running across the tundra, wearing a green dress with gorgeous embroidery. She reaches a man in a suit, who puts his hand on her waist. The first time she has the dream, her daughter wakes her up (“I made pancakes!!”) before she can see his face. The second time … well. That would spoil it.

Lambesaidin an interview that the sequence came about because showrunner Stacey Aglok MacDonald had a dream of “an InukBridgerton.” And, as TikTok usersnoticed, the music in Siaja’s dream—an instrumental heavy on the strings—is Keane’s “Somewhere Only We Know,” covered by Caleb Chan and Brian Chan, who also worked on theBridgertonprequelQueen Charlotte.*But what works so well about this reference is that it isn’t at all forced or self-serving. Siaja, the character, would totally be aBridgertonfan, with the kind of brain that would generate that kind of a soft-toned dream. It’s another clever twist, in a very clever, sweet show.

Correction, April 21, 2025: This piece originally misstated that the cover of Keane’s “Somewhere Only We Know” used in the show’s Episode 6 was by Duomo. It was by Caleb Chan and Brian Chan.