2016 - 2018
Frontier landed on Netflix in November 2016 as the first original scripted commission from Discovery Canada, a three-season co-production shot in the bogs and coasts of Newfoundland and set in the Canadian wilderness of the late 1700s. Jason Momoa plays Declan Harp, a half-Irish, half-Cree outlaw who runs his own trapping outfit, the Black Wolf Company, in direct violent defiance of the Hudson's Bay Company's monopoly on the fur trade. Created by Rob Blackie and Peter Blackie, the show stretches across 18 episodes over three short, dense seasons that originally aired from 2016 to 2018.
The premise is not complicated. HBC runs the trade. Harp wants to break the monopoly. Everyone else, French Canadian trappers, Scottish merchants out of Montreal, Irish stowaways, Cree and Métis warriors, London boardroom investors, gets crushed, co-opted, or flipped in the middle. It is a story about corporate violence at the edge of empire, told as a revenge Western with snowshoes.
Momoa is the reason most people show up, and he pays that attention off. His Declan Harp is a bigger, wilder, more personally wrecked figure than the mainstream Aquaman persona that would soon overtake him, and Frontier gives him the better material for what he can actually do when a role leans into grief and menace rather than charm. He disappears for stretches of season one, which is a risky choice the show makes on purpose, and the absence works.
The rest of the ensemble is strong and unusually British for a Canadian prestige drama:
Shawn Doyle
Samuel Grant
Evan Jonigkeit
Captain Jonathan Chesterfield
Jessica Matten
Sokanon
Alun Armstrong
Lord Benton
Landon Liboiron
Michael Smyth
Lyla Porter-Follows
Clenna Dolan
Greg Bryk
Cobbs Pond
Michael Patric
Malcolm Brown
This needs saying up front. Frontier is viciously violent. Tomahawks to the skull, on-screen scalpings, public hangings filmed with the camera held on the victim, torture in the HBC's Fort James cells, throat-openings in close quarters. The show does not flinch and does not look away. Anyone going in expecting a prestige costume drama in the Outlander vein will bounce off the pilot in about ten minutes.
What saves the brutality from being pornographic is that nobody on screen treats it as routine. A scalping matters here. The camera sits with the aftermath. Harp himself is visibly broken by what he has done and what he will go on to do, and Momoa is good enough to let that register between the action beats. The show is closer tonally to Taboo or Peaky Blinders than to anything in the gentler historical-drama wheelhouse. If the bloodletting in Vikings or The Last Kingdom was your limit, Frontier is a notch past it.
Strip the fur pelts out and Frontier is a show about a chartered corporation running a colony as a profit centre. The Hudson's Bay Company was a real thing, it held a royal monopoly on everything draining into Hudson Bay for more than two centuries, and the show takes seriously how that works on the ground. Benton is not a psychopath invented for narrative convenience. He is a director doing corporate strategy with a private army.
That reading puts the show somewhere unusual. It is a period piece where the villain is the shareholders, and the hero is a violent half-Cree outlaw trying to start a competing business. The Indigenous characters are not scenery, and they are not the clumsy "noble teachers" trope either. Sokanon fights, negotiates, loses people, and has her own trading stake in the Black Wolf Company. The Métis and Cree characters argue with each other about strategy. Matten has been loud in interviews about how rare that representation is in the genre.
Shot almost entirely in Newfoundland, Frontier looks cold in a way a lot of Canadian drama does not bother to earn. Breath condenses. Boots sink. The Fort James interiors are lit by actual firelight and the scenes drag slightly in the gloom, which is the point. The score runs heavy on low drones and hand-played string.
It will never be mistaken for The Terror, which does Arctic dread with a much bigger budget. But the visual language is consistent, the wardrobe is worn-in rather than freshly pressed, and I kept noticing the battles were actually choreographed instead of hidden behind the shaky-cam shortcut. For a show working on Discovery Canada money, it punches well above.
Reviews were split. Rotten Tomatoes logged it at 43% from critics and much higher from audiences, a gap that tells you a lot about who the show was for. The Rotten Tomatoes critic consensus summed it up neatly.
Jason Momoa's powerhouse performance as Declan Harp is ultimately weighed down by Frontier's often sluggish storytelling.
That is a fair description of the show's problem and also its appeal. It won a Canadian Screen Award for makeup in 2017 and picked up further nominations for costume and hair through its three-season run.
Netflix cancelled it after season three in 2018 without a formal announcement, which is the streamer's signature move for shows it considers content-fill rather than a flagship. Momoa went straight into Aquaman and then into See, and the fanbase has been asking for a fourth season ever since.
Frontier is the Jason Momoa project where his physical intensity has the right material underneath it. It is not always well paced, the season-one middle sags, and a couple of the subplots in season three get left on the table when the cancellation hit. I watched all three seasons in about a week and the ending is clearly not one.
But the best of it, Momoa at full tilt, Armstrong's pure corporate evil, Matten's Sokanon, the Fort James set in winter, is as good as anything in the genre. Fans of Black Sails, Banshee, or Westworld's violence-without-apology will find a lot to like. It is the under-discussed third side of the Momoa TV trilogy, between Game of Thrones and See, and it is probably the best of the three for the performance itself.
Jason Momoa
Declan Harp
Zoe Boyle
Grace Emberly
Allan Hawco
Douglas Brown
Katie McGrath
Elizabeth Carruthers