It’s a misty, wet day in March on Vancouver Island, and I’m stepping onto the set of Yaga, a spooky new mystery drama from Canadian streaming service Crave, premiering stateside on AMC+ on October 23. Toronto-based playwright Kat Sandler adapted the series from her 2019 play of the same name and serves as its showrunner. In this westernmost slice of Canada, it rarely snows during winter. Instead, there is a constant deluge of rain, and fog rolls over the island’s coast to fill its lush green forests with an eerie quality. You could easily imagine a witch living in these woods, crushing bones to dust and cackling into the night. It is the perfect backdrop for Yaga, arriving on our screens during the year’s spookiest month.
Yaga begins as a missing-person investigation that will feel familiar to fans of the mystery genre: Carson (Clark Backo) is a local detective investigating the disappearance of Henry (Hudson Williams), a college student who happens to be the heir of a commercial fishery. His wealthy parents, hoping to take matters into their own hands, hire Rapp (Noah Reid), a private investigator whom Carson reluctantly agrees to work with. Together, they interview people in the small coastal town of Whittock to collect evidence into Henry’s disappearance—but there is something deeply amiss, from Henry’s secretive osteology professor, Katherine (Carrie-Anne Moss), to the odd, witchy phenomena that begin to plague Rapp as he gets deeper into the case. Woven into the investigation is the legend of Baba Yaga, a powerful witch from Slavic folklore who can help or harm those who cross her path. Whether she lurks in the woods or walks among the townspeople is part of the mystery.
Today, the production and all-Canadian cast have set up shop at St. Michaels University School, a fancy boarding school on the southern tip of the island, a short drive from Victoria. I’m in the producer’s tent, damp and shivering under a blanket with a headset on, watching Reid and Backo descend the steps outside the school’s central entrance for yet another take of a scene from the second episode. The bricked exterior is covered almost completely with vines, and Moss is looking down through a window on the top floor. I watch Reid, in character as Rapp, try a few variations on a greasy wink directed at Katherine as the take wraps. Backo groans at his cockiness, establishing their entertaining, perhaps flirtatious rapport.
“I can’t fucking believe I get to do this,” Sandler tells me later, tucked away in the corner of a student lounge, with a twinkle of passion in her eyes. “We don’t get to do stuff like this in Canada that takes risks, that pushes the envelope and is willing to not sit in comfort. Heated Rivalry did it.” Despite Yaga’s original form as a play, Sandler says it feels only natural for it to have ended up as television. In fact, she has always felt she was “stealing” from television in her writing. “The whole point was to try to make theater for people who don’t like theater—make it really fast-paced, funny, sexy, and violent,” she says. “My dialogue has always been really cinematic and very TV-esque.”
