HUDSON WILLIAMS HAS seen his acting career go stratospheric thanks to starring as Shane Hollander in the Canadian hockey romance series Heated Rivalry.

Now comes his next big role in another series for the same network, Crave, called Yaga. Given that up to this year his roles outside of Heated Rivalry comprised short films, a tiny part in the made-for-TV movie All I Need for Christmas and an episode of the series Tracker, this is fans’ first time witnessing him at length out of his beloved Shane Hollander guise. And it’s quite a leap he’s taken.

Cleverly for Williams, he’s picked not just another Canadian project (signalling his loyalty to his home country’s screen industry), but a pair of roles that are both far from the closeted, shy athlete Hollander.

Missing student

Yaga is based on the play of the same name by Kat Sandler (showrunner of the TV series) and centres on a missing student named Henry Park, who’s played by Williams. Park has gone AWOL after taking $50k out of his account, and his rich parents are abroad and wondering where he is.

Where the series swerves from the original text is that Williams also plays Henry’s mysterious roommate Logan Casey, a character who isn’t in the play. With the help of prosthetics, Logan looks a little different from Henry – he has acne scars and a more prominent nose, and wears glasses. Henry has blue eyes and the smooth skin of a man who grew up with a lot more money than his roommate.

Originally, these two roles were meant to be played by different actors. Casting Williams as the pair is a clever move. It adds a curious doppelganger edge to the men’s relationship, enabling the plot to twist off in new ways, and fans get to see Williams on screen sooner. In the first few episodes, we only see Henry on ‘missing’ posters. 

Noah Reid as Rapp Bell Media Bell Media

Friction

These posters are brought to the fictional coastal town by a detective named Charlie Rapp (played by Schitt’s Creek’s Noah Reid), who’s been hired by Henry’s family to locate him. But is he even a proper detective at all? That’s what police officer Carson (Clark Backo) is wondering when the pair are teamed up. In classic investigative thriller style, there’s friction between the duo from the jump. 

Part of that friction is down to Rapp’s smooth talking and flirtatious behaviour. From the beginning of the show we pick up a feminist tone to Yaga. When we first meet Carson, she’s reading in her car. Her boss makes a dismissive comment about the romantasy novel, before trying bond with Rapp by making a ‘when men were men’ comment to him.

Carson has clearly had enough of these boorish attitudes, though there are some moments that don’t exactly ring true in how she deals with Rapp as a result. She’s perhaps a little more forgiving than you’d expect at times, even if she’s unhappy. This adds to a feeling at the beginning of the show that perhaps Carson is holding back her criticism because it would unleash a torrent of rage that the men around her simply couldn’t handle.

More signs of the men in the town’s attitudes towards women, and the women’s responses to that, pile up. Henry Park is clearly a playboy, and though his roommate Logan acts bumbling and shy, the fact he appears at the door in little more than a pair of dungarees, and acts a bit shifty when questioned, leads viewers to suspect he benefits from Henry’s behaviour. By episode two, it’s confirmed that Logan is indeed perhaps less innocent than we suspected.

The female characters, meanwhile, are a mix of charmed by Rapp and repelled by him. Carson brings Rapp around the town to meet with people like Henry’s ex-girlfriend Pam Russell (Ezra Franky) and his former lecturer, Professor Katherine Yazov (Carrie Anne Moss from The Matrix). Pam isn’t very concerned about Henry, to the point of overstepping it with her offhand comments about him.

Katherine, meanwhile, has been given the nickname ‘the boner beast’ because of her seductive nature and her knowledge of bones. The nickname is a little too on the nose for this reviewer, but it nonetheless gets the point across. This is a woman with a reputation, but she’s also a woman who has lived a life on her terms.

Just two of the eight episodes were made available to reviewers, meaning we’re left with questions about how the series will progress. The original play has some deliciously twisty moments at the end, and strong visuals which are fully embraced in the first few episodes – one of the first scenes we see is a man in a forest, tied to a stake and set alight. That certainly tells us this show is going to dark places. 

The voice of Baba Yaga herself is given prominence in the episodes too, foregrounding her as an older, experienced and undermined woman. Even if you haven’t read the source material, you’ll pick up that the series is about women’s multigenerational experiences, from the young daughter of the local café owner, through to her fierce mother, through to the mysterious Katherine and onwards.

Hudson Williiam as Henry Park & Carrie Anne Moss As Katherine Bell Media Bell Media

Intrigue

The men in the town often come across as duplicitous or clueless. Cleverly, the show lets viewers see from early on that the wisecracking Rapp might not be exactly who he claims to be. This adds a tasty element of intrigue as we wonder what the true nature of his relationship to Henry is, and how much he’s withholding from Carson. Rapp presents himself as happy-go-lucky, but is there more to him than he’s letting on?  

In Yaga, Reid gets to have a lot of fun with the flirty Rapp, who seems to be concealing much behind his jolly exterior. Carrie Anne Moss’s character Katherine is also someone who’s withholding plenty from us, but it’s very appealing to see a 50-something woman who’s in full control of her sexuality, even if you might question the appropriateness of her behaviour at times.

As Carson, Backo acts as an interlocutor for the audience, questioning Rapp’s intentions and deploying a range of facial expressions to display her annoyance when she feels like she can’t actually say anything. In the episodes available to reviewers in Ireland, Williams was very enjoyable as the mysterious Logan, who shows two very distinct sides to him and ends episode two in a dramatic situation that leaves us very hungry for more.

At just 25, Williams is showing an eagerness to push himself with roles that require nudity and sex scenes, but he’s clearly not just choosing projects based on that. In Yaga, he gets to have fun by embodying two different men who each have a dark side. That he’s chosen to stick with Canada for a female-focused project is also a lovely sign that he’s paying close attention to supporting homegrown creators.

While Yaga is a different show to the excellent Furious, on Disney+, it shares with it a desire to hold men to account for generations of ills perpetrated against women. Some of this is put across in a pointed way, while other times we pick up that women have been finding their own ways of dealing with latent sexism. 

Tonally, it brings us the investigative focus of series like Broadchurch and The Killing but mixes in the folk-horror vibes of True Detective. There’s also a welcome sarcastic thread of humour running throughout the show. It adds a brightness to a series that contains heavy themes, even if at times the humour rubs up against those very themes.

Plus, Yaga has quite a steamy edge to it too, something that the cast and showrunner have teased in interviews. In the second episode, there’s a sex scene that doesn’t hold back from exposing the male character involved. It’s notable, and presumably purposeful not just from a plot point of view, that the woman involved is barely visible. We know that there’ll be more such scenes to come involving some of the main characters as the series progresses.  

If you’re a fan of investigative thrillers, this certainly serves up enough to get stuck into. But it’s the other elements that it explores which make Yaga so enticing to watch. It has an edge of unrealness to it, a sense that it’s in a parallel universe to our own. While it takes from Slavic folklore’s Baba Yaga myth, it’s not so beholden to it that it can’t bring its own spin on the tale.

As strange moments pile up – often involving chickens, which are part of the Baba Yaga myth – we recognise that the world of Yaga is like a particularly grisly fairytale. It will be interesting to see how the series develops beyond its early stages – whether Rapp’s relationships with the female characters move beyond the obvious, and if the Logan/Henry dynamic allows Williams even more juicy character work.

If that all sounds like catnip to you, Yaga will air in Ireland on 31 October on Sky Atlantic, and will be available to stream on NOW.