By Scott Campbell
Netflix subscribers were quick to respond to a little soapy teen drama called Finding Her Edge, set in a world of competitive figure skating and featuring love triangles.
Based on Jennifer Iacopelli’s 2022 novel, interest in the show boosted book sales by the January 22 release on the streamer. The series, produced by Canadian company WildBrain, features Canadians in the cast and was filmed in Ontario.
Netflix renewed the show for a second season, 12 days after the premiere.
Showrunner Jeff Norton was thrilled with the news.
“To be embraced around the world,” he said during the Zoom interview from Burlington, Ont. “Particularly in places where I wasn’t sure it would be. It was the No. 1 show, almost out of the gate in places like Brazil, Central Europe, and some places in the Nordics. It’s amazing.”
The eight-episode season highlights three sisters in a struggling figure skating family. Adriana Russo (Madelyn Keys) trains for Worlds with new partner Brayden Elliot (Cale Ambrozic) but still has feelings for her former partner Freddie O’Connell (Olly Atkins).
“I actually read [the book] as a manuscript,” said Norton. “And there are two things I loved about it. The first is I loved this set of characters. I really thought these were a special group of people, and I loved that these were characters that we met at a time in their lives where things were not going particularly well.
“And to me, that was a really interesting way into a family drama and to a romance, and Finding Her Edge is both of those two things.”
Norton remembers drawing a diagram of two intersecting triangles with Adriana in the middle. The triangle of her sisters, the familial one, and that love triangle which is Adriana, Freddie and Brayden.
The second thing Norton found appealing about the novel? “Jennifer had built Finding Her Edge in the modern world of elite figure skating on this incredibly strong foundation of a Jane Austen novel.”
Norton is involved in an upcoming Netflix series titled Crew Girl. He also plugged Netflix’s Geek Girl, which he worked on, too. But Finding Her Edge is his first show as a showrunner.
“Somebody gave me a piece of advice before I started showrunning,” he recalls. “Which is that my most critical job is to be the keeper of the tone of the show, and I take that very seriously. And, for me, the role of the showrunner is that there are thousands of decisions to make, all of which roll up into a vision for what is the show you want the audience to experience.”
Norton gave one example of looking for a particular tone of timeless romance. Early in the season, Adriana runs after Brayden when he’s on a train.
“I wanted to have something that felt like it was from another era,” he said. “So I challenged our production design team and our locations team
to find something that felt that way… and we ended up filming in a train museum, the Simcoe County Railway, and that’s an old 1926 rail car that’s sitting outside in the freezing cold, that we filmed in.”
Filming for the season took 80 days at various locations. The Russo house is on Shanty Bay in Barrie, Ont., the main street in the fictional town of Wentworth, where the skaters live, is downtown Orillia. A Wasaga Beach arena was used for qualifiers, the CAA Centre in Brampton stood in for a Paris arena for Worlds, and some scenes were actually shot in Paris, France.
It’s no coincidence either, that the Winter Olympics were happening around the same time as the show’s release.
“It was very deliberate,” said Norton, when the show was pitched in the autumn of 2024. “We will have a drama on the platform at the same time as people are excited about the sports at the Winter Olympics, particularly ice dance and figure skating.”
Norton gives much credit to the cast and crew, and since there is only one book, he is already sketching ideas for the second season.
“I’ve been working very diligently on a plan for Season 2 and an outline for all of the characters, which really follows the trajectory that we started in Season 1. Now, I don’t want to spoil anything…”
Season 1 of Finding Her Edge is available on Netflix.
Featured image courtesy of Netflix.
