North of North writers sweep comedy awards category
North of North swept the Comedy Series category of the Writers Guild of Canada Screenwriting Awards earning five nominations, including three for Duntroon resident Garry Campbell.
“It feels good personally I’m not going to lie,” said Campbell, an Emmy and Gemini award nominee, and Canadian Screen Awards and Writers Guild of Canada award winner known for his work on Kim’s Convenience, Less Than Kind, MADtv, and The Kids in the Hall. “But I like that it brings focus back to the show.”
The comedy series North of North, created by Inuk filmmakers Stacey Aglok MacDonald and Alethea Arnaquq-Baril of Nunavut, is now in production for Season 2.
North of North, set in the fictional town of Ice Cove on Prince of Wales Island, Nunavut, is about a young Inuk woman, Siaja (Anna Lambe) who seeks to find her own identity within her small community of family and friends.
“The show has gotten a lot of attention,” said Campbell. “It’s an important show. It’s a voice, it’s a people and it’s a part of the country that most people don’t know much about. They either know little about it or they have wild misconceptions about it, and it’s nice that we are able to shine a light on what it’s really like up there and what the people are like up there, how they’re the same and how they’re different.”
He spent four months on set in Iqaluit, during filming for Season 1, where the crew rented a curling rink in which to build sets.
He had two job offers at the time and turned down a much surer thing to work on North of North. Campbell said he got a really good feeling from his very first meeting with the creators and wanted to support their show, feeling that he really cared about the people involved and its themes.
“I turned it down just on the chance that North of North would happen because I really wanted to do it,” said Campbell. “It just felt like the right place for me. Because they were new – they’d never done a TV show before – I just thought I’d be of more use there, too.”
North of North premiered in 2025 on CBC, APTN, and Netflix.
“It’s such a big deal to go from not even considering yourself a television writer to all of a sudden being on a show that’s going to be on Netflix, so potentially millions of people around the world are going to be watching it,” said Campbell. “It’s not zero-to-60, it’s zero-to-6,000 and it’s super daunting. The pressure those guys felt on a daily basis, it’s honestly hard for me to image because it’s been so long since I was that guy, if I was ever that guy.”
He admits he had never really thought himself as a mentor until this project but said he really wanted to be involved in order to support young talent.
“It’s more front of mind for me now,” he said, adding that sometimes the experience he brings to the table is more about how to problem solve, find solutions without panicking and dealing with notes from the networks.
“That’s why you nurture this talent. You have to make a concerted effort to bring in Indigenous people to work on an Indigenous show – it’s insanity if you don’t – but then you have to have more seasoned people in there to support them, bring them up, help them learn the craft,” said Campbell.
He saw his role as helping to make themes universal while deferring to the creators.
“There were lots of things we had to fight for because changing it would have been inauthentic,” said Campbell. “That’s the beauty of the show is that we’re all the same – we may have grown up in different places and have different beliefs – at our core, all thesame things matter, all the same things are important and the show really illustrates that, I think.”
The 30th annual WGC Screenwriting Awards will be presented on April 27, at Koerner Hall in Toronto.
North of North Season 1 has eight episodes, five of which received nominations at the 2026 WGC Screenwriting Awards — Comedy Series nominees:
• North of North, Bad Influences, Story by Aviaq Johnston and JP Larocque, Teleplay by Aviaq Johnston and Garry Campbell;
• North of North, Dumpcano, written by Garry Campbell;
• North of North, Joy to the Effing World, written by Alethea Arnaquq- Baril and Linsey Stewart;
• North of North, Top of the World, written by Stacey Aglok Macdonald and Alethea Arnaquq-Baril;
• North of North, Walrus Dick Baseball, written by Moriah Sallaffie and Garry Campbell.
Contributed photo: Stacey Aglok MacDonald, Miranda De Pencier, Garry Campbell, Anna Lambe and Alethea Arnaquq-Baril on the set of North of North.
