Yaga, the eight-episode Canadian series now streaming on AMC+ in the U.S. and Crave in Canada, starring Carrie-Anne Moss and Hudson Williams, takes the oldest bad girl in Eastern European folklore and drops her into a fog-soaked coastal town where nobody seems to notice that the women are running the show. Creator, writer and showrunner Kat Sandler, adapting her own 2019 stage play, has made something rare on television: a detective story that is genuinely spooky, genuinely sexy and, often, genuinely funny.
The setup is pure noir. Henry Park (Hudson Williams), the spoiled heir to a commercial fishery fortune, has vanished. His family hires a private investigator named Rapp (Noah Reid), who partners with a local detective, Carson (Clark Backo). Their search leads to Katherine (Carrie-Anne Moss), an anthropology professor with ties to Henry and a well-known appetite for younger men, and to Olena Yaha (Sheila McCarthy), a dying woman originally from Ukraine. Producer Mackenzie Donaldson has called the show a “crazy fairy tale dressed up like a detective series.” That is exactly right, and the costume fits.
A Mystery That Knows It’s Funny
What separates Yaga from the glut of moody small-town whodunits is its wicked sense of humor. Rotten Tomatoes’ critics consensus calls it a “darkly comic supernatural mystery,” and the comedy is baked into the bones. Rapp and Carson banter like a mismatched buddy-cop pair, and Noah Reid, so warm on Schitt’s Creek, flirts with nearly every female suspect in town while the town barely blinks. Sheila McCarthy’s Baba Yaga narrates with sardonic asides about how society blames witches for everything. Each episode opens with a Slavic-language cover of a pop song, and Alanis Morissette’s cover of “Season of the Witch” serves as the theme. There is even, inevitably, a wink at John Wick, whose hitman borrowed the old crone’s name.
Then there is the strange true detail. Katherine’s students have nicknamed her “the Boner Beast,” a tribute to lectures on crab spiders that the A.V. Club describes as “weirdly erotic.” It is the kind of joke that tells you everything about the show’s tone. Yaga is bawdy, a little impish and entirely unbothered by its own appetites.
Unapologetically Steamy
Those appetites are a big part of the fun. The series has been billed as an erotic thriller, and it earns the label. The nudity and sexual content are frank, adult and refreshingly free of hand-wringing, an openness that recalls Heated Rivalry, the hockey romance that turned Williams into a heartthrob. Co-star Noah Reid has called Williams’s turn “scary hot,” and the show seems determined to prove him right. When Williams sheds his shirt, and more, the camera gives him the kind of lingering appreciation television has long reserved for actresses. Turnabout, as they say, is fair play.
But Hudson Williams is not just eye candy. He plays two roles: Henry, a narcissist who treats people like disposable toys, and Logan, Henry’s meek, jealous lookalike who lives on the Park estate. Fans who swooned over his tender hockey star will find these men smarmy and far less lovable, and that is the point. TheWrap praised how distinctly he separates the two performances. Williams, it turns out, can do menace as well as he does charm.
Carrie-Anne Moss, Unleashed
Still, this is Moss’s show, and she knows it. Katherine is a professor in full command of her intellect and her desires, a woman who keeps an active sex life and makes no apologies for it. She is seductive, sharp-tongued and morally compromised, and Carrie-Anne Moss, who also serves as an executive producer, plays her with a smoldering, knowing confidence that is a pleasure to watch. Critics have rightly singled her out. TheWrap called her “the perfect antihero” and compared Katherine to television’s great male rule-breakers, from Tony Soprano to Dexter Morgan. Inverse named her the breakout of an already all-star cast.
The casting carries a pointed edge. Hollywood has a long habit of retiring actresses from desirability somewhere around 40, then handing them the role of somebody’s mother. Yaga builds its central mystery around the invisibility of older women, and then gives its older woman the sexiest, most dangerous part in the series. Both Henry and Rapp are desperate to claim her. Carrie-Anne Moss told the Bell Media Upfront audience that she “got to make out with” Hudson Williams, adding that he was “super respectful.” Their pairing is the hottest ticket in a town full of secrets.
Carrie-Anne Moss spent years as the leather-clad Trinity in The Matrix, a role that made her an icon of cool. Katherine is something else entirely: warmer, wilder and far more wicked. It is the most fun she has had on screen in years, and it shows.
The Spell, and Its Limits
The ensemble around them is strong. Backo grounds the series as Carson, whose perspective guides the story and who carries more agency than the typical rookie cop. Reid’s Rapp grows quietly suspect, a man who reshapes his personality to suit whoever he is talking to and whose dreams and visions raise doubts about his own mind. Megan Follows and Katharine Isabelle round out a cast stacked with Canadian talent, and the Vancouver Island locations give the whole affair a misty, retro mood likened to good ole late-’90s urban fantasy.
Yaga is not flawless. Hudon Williams’s top billing promises more Henry than the plot delivers, and the series raises more questions about gender and power than it fully answers. But it’s early yet and these are gripes of a viewer who wanted more, not less.
What lingers is the combination. Strong acting, a deliciously dark sense of humor, a gorgeous leading man who is willing to bare more than his soul and a leading lady who refuses to fade politely into the background. Yaga takes the witch out of the woodpile and puts her front and center. Watch it with the lights low.
The eight half-hour episodes of Yaga premiered October 23, 2026 with two episodes, on AMC+ in the U.S. and Crave in Canada. The series also streams on Sky in the U.K. and Ireland and on HBO Max in much of Europe. Learn more at amcplus.com.