‘Yaga’ Boss Sets Up Sexy-Witchy-Cool New Thriller

The network behind Anne Rice‘s Mayfair Witches and A Discovery of Witches adds a new member to their content coven with this sexy, darkly comic thriller Yaga, inspired by the Slavic legend of the child-eating Baba Yaga crone.

“The traditional myth of the Baba Yaga is an old, ugly, barren woman who lives in a hut on chicken feet in the middle of the woods,” showrunner Kat Sandler explained to the crowd at San Diego Comic-Con in July. “She flies in a mortar and pestle, eating the bones of naughty children.”

While we may not see that version of the folklore favorite, we will be seeing some very strong women with the kind of fascinating dark sides Sandler specializes in.

AMC

“I’ve always been obsessed with the idea of a female anti-hero,” she continued during the panel. “I loved Dexter and Hannibal and the idea of being able to see a woman through that lens of behaving really badly and doing evil things but having so much fun doing it.’  She added that the on-screen adaptation of her own 2019 play is the result of a life spent consuming the many genres that form her worldview.

“I grew up with these cookie-cutter fairy tales and the witch was always the evil one… but she always really seems to be having the most fun, too! So we thought it would be fun to put a lens of this thriller kind of mashup [with] all the stuff I’ve loved since I was younger…these procedural detective stories and mysteries all mixed in with these pulpy rom-coms. It’s a real, true mashup.”

AMC

And it’s enchanting from the jump. Set in a remote coastal town, the series acquired from Canadian streamer Crave (which produced Heated Rivalry) immediately sets up the central mystery as private investigator Rapp (Schitt’s Creek alum Noah Reid) arrives to help a local cop named Carson (Clark Backo) find the missing heir to a fishing dynasty (Heated Rivalry‘s Hudson Williams, who booked the role just as HR was blowing up).

[Fun fact: Sandler had originally cast Reid in the stage version of Yaga, but had to leave the production to film Schitt’s Creek.]

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Aiding — or perhaps enchanting? — their hunt is the enigmatic Katherine (Carrie-Anne Moss, The Acolyte), a college professor whose expertise in the study of bones is only matched by her taste for younger men. Whether or not she’s the Baba Yaga, Backo warns nothing is as it seems at first and that viewers may want to put down their phones if they want to catch all of the clues. “[It] forces audiences to pay attention,” she said of the show’s eight “story-packed” 30-minute episodes. “If you look down, you are missing something.”

Ain’t that a witch?

Yaga, Series Premiere, October TBA, AMC