Below on Netflix: The Newfoundland Stories Behind the Series

A commercial fishing vessel in St. John’s Harbour.

Before Netflix told us much about Below, St. John’s had already been talking about it for a good year.

This is not a large city. A Hollywood actor does not spend months here without people noticing. There were sightings of Josh Hartnett around downtown, talk of an untitled Netflix production and, inevitably, somebody who knew somebody who had heard something. What he was actually filming was harder to pin down.

Then came the car accident. In September 2025, Hartnett was a passenger in an SUV that collided with an RNC patrol vehicle at New Cove Road and Elizabeth Avenue. He was taken to hospital with minor injuries and soon returned to work.

Poor guy. The accident happened just up the road from my mother’s house. I heard about it on the radio while driving through that same intersection, which pretty much sums up St. John’s. For a while, that very local piece of news was the clearest confirmation many of us had that a Netflix production involving Josh Hartnett really was being filmed here.

Then the trailer arrived, and the rumours finally became something we could see. There was the fishing community, the house being moved across the water, the iceberg, the Screech-In and the accents, which people here know well enough to judge within a sentence or two. The mysterious Netflix project had become Below.

The six-part series went on to have its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, followed days later by a special screening at the Majestic Theatre in St. John’s. Netflix set October 8, 2026, as the global release date for all six episodes.

There has been a real buzz around it, both here at home and across Canada. Josh Hartnett, Mackenzie Davis and Charlie Heaton give the series star power, but that is not the main reason so many Newfoundlanders are excited.

This is a major Netflix production set on the island of Newfoundland and filmed here with Newfoundlanders working in front of and behind the camera. It takes pieces of our history, humour, way of speaking and storytelling culture seriously enough to build a series around them. Someone saw value in those things and believed a worldwide audience would see it too.

What Below Is About

Netflix describes Below as a thriller about Calvin Penney, a fisherman played by Hartnett. His struggling community faces a new threat when an unidentified creature begins terrorizing the town. Mackenzie Davis plays visiting marine researcher Fonda Howander, while Charlie Heaton plays Calvin’s son, Wade.

The series is set in a fictionalized version of Snook’s Arm, a real community on the Baie Verte Peninsula. Its final ten residents agreed to resettle in 2018. Below imagines a version of Snook’s Arm that refused to disappear.

Creator Jesse McKeown had wanted to make something in Newfoundland for years. His fictional town faces a question many real communities have faced: what happens when the work that sustained a place begins to disappear? Snook’s Arm is already in trouble before the creature becomes its most immediate threat. There are no fish left, and the community’s few remaining residents are debating whether to leave for good.

I have only seen the trailers and coverage released so far, so this is not a review. What interests me is how much recognizable history is already running through the story.

The History Behind the Trailer

The trailer opens with a house being moved across the water. Elsewhere, that may simply look like a wonderfully strange image. Newfoundlanders know what it means.

During the government-supported resettlement programmes of the twentieth century, thousands left smaller communities for larger centres. Some families even floated their houses to their new homes.

Then came the northern cod moratorium in 1992. About 30,000 people across Newfoundland and Labrador lost work. The effects moved through families, businesses and communities, driving outmigration and changing places that had depended on the fishery for generations.

Executive producer Chris Hatcher has said resettlement and the struggle to hold on to a changing way of life are important themes in Below. Those histories are not confined to outports. St. John’s was built because of the fishery, suffered when it collapsed and became home to many people who left smaller communities when work and services disappeared.

I grew up in St. John's, not in a small fishing village, but this is still our history. The loss of a fishery threatens more than jobs. It can threaten the future of a place.

The trailer also includes lighter details. An iceberg sits off the coast, while a Screech-In has a visitor kissing the cod and following it with a shot of the good stuff. The tourist ceremony is meant to be a bit ridiculous. Seeing it beside the harder history feels right. Our humour has never waited for hardship to clear the room.

A Story Made From Stories

Storytelling has always mattered in Newfoundland and Labrador. Stories carried family history, local events and warnings from one person to another. They preserved what happened, but also entertained, changed with the telling and occasionally became better than the truth.

That is one of the reasons City of Legends exists. St. John’s is full of stories that sit somewhere between documented history, memory and legend. You can follow one through a building, a street name, an old newspaper report or something somebody remembers being told as a child.

Below draws from that same tradition, combining the history of changing fishing communities with myths, oddities, humour and something dangerous in the water. Its fiction is built from things people here recognize.

One of its stranger details is even true. McKeown told Entertainment Weekly that the first episode includes a dead flamingo presented to Fonda. She wonders whether it is a sign that something has disrupted migration patterns.

In 1977, a flamingo really did reach the island. It was shot by someone who reportedly mistook it for a goose, and the preserved bird eventually became part of the collection at The Rooms in St. John’s. It is exactly the sort of story that sounds made up until somebody points you towards the evidence.

Made Here, With People From Here

Newfoundland and Labrador writers, directors, performers and crew helped make the series. The island is more than its scenery.

St. John’s-born filmmaker Stephen Dunn is one of the directors, alongside Jamie Childs and Helen Shaver. Perry Chafe, who grew up in Petty Harbour and worked on Republic of Doyle, Son of a Critch and Saint-Pierre, joined McKeown, Karen Walton and Natty Zavitz on the writing team.

The cast includes Willow Kean and St. John’s-born Mary Walsh. The Canadian Press reports that the series shot in St. John’s and drew on Newfoundland and Labrador’s screen talent on both sides of the camera.

That local involvement matters, particularly when it comes to language and humour. Newfoundlanders will listen closely to the accents because, while there is no single Newfoundland accent - the way people speak can change from one community to the next - we know when it sounds natural, when it has drifted into imitation and, yes, cringe when somebody pronounces Newfoundland as “New-found-land.”

Netflix says Hartnett listened daily to a local radio station featuring fishermen while preparing for the role. Charlie Heaton spent time in communities outside St. John’s and listened to people speak. That does not guarantee every vowel will satisfy every local ear, but at least they understood that an accent could not simply be pulled off a shelf marked “East Coast.”

How Newfoundlanders Will Watch It

Pride does not mean Newfoundlanders will watch Below uncritically. We can be fiercely protective when someone else represents this place. We will notice the accents, turns of phrase and geography. We will notice whether an iceberg, a cod or a bottle of Screech belongs naturally in the story or has been brought in because someone thinks it looks sufficiently Newfoundland.

That scrutiny comes from caring about a place too often reduced to familiar images, jokes and exaggerated voices.

I expect there will be details people debate, and probably some they dislike, but I do not want to spend six episodes scouring Below for everything it did not get right. I would rather begin from a place of excitement.

A production of this size was filmed here with Newfoundlanders in front of and behind the camera, using our history to tell a story intended for viewers around the world. Snook’s Arm is not St. John’s, but its histories of fishing, leaving and trying to hold on are familiar here too.

That is why Below belongs on City of Legends. This blog exists because this place is full of stories worth carrying forward. Now one of them has been given a Netflix budget, a recognizable cast and an audience far larger than the one gathered around a kitchen table.

I am curious to see what they do with it. More than that, I am glad they thought our stories were worth telling.