What Canadian TV show is more popular with Americans than ‘Friends’? Try ‘Heartland’

There’s a Canadian TV show that is winning a most elusive and dreamt-of prize in Canadian entertainment: a big American audience. An almost astonishingly large one, in fact.

Big-city viewers, you may wish to sit down.

It’s “Heartland.”

Last month, Variety published Nielsen audience numbers for streaming shows in 2022; the long-running family-ranch drama was the 13th most popular show of any sort in the U.S., ahead of “The Simpsons” and “Friends.” Nielsen reported 18 billion minutes viewed, the equivalent of 360 million full episodes. It’s as if every single American watched an instalment.

It wasn’t a sudden explosion of interest; numbers from the previous year ranked the horse-filled show as streaming’s fifth most popular “acquired” (that is, not a streaming service original) show, well ahead of the likes of “Seinfeld” and “The Walking Dead.”

All this for a show that after 16 seasons and 249 episodes, is a part of this country’s TV landscape that’s rather taken for granted — getting very little love at the Canadian Screen Awards, for example.

What’s going on here?

“Nothing beats horse porn,” said veteran Canadian TV writer Bill Brioux, with tongue in cheek, when asked to shed some light on “Heartland” and its U.S. triumphs. More sincerely, “I think there’s probably a hunger for family shows, family drama. And it’s not really served these days by even streaming.”

And “Heartland” is nothing if not a family show. Set on the Bartlett clan’s expansive abode in the Rocky Mountain foothills of Alberta, it’s devoted centrally to Amy (Amber Marshall), who has gone from a girl losing her mother in the first episode back in 2007 to a young mother and widow now. Residing with her is the grandfather who raised her, her once estranged father, Tim, and their spouses and children, as they navigate matters of love and business — Amy’s business being her knack for healing troubled steeds as a kind of horse whisperer.

It might be tempting to compare it to another juggernaut: the ranch show that does get talked about, “Yellowstone.” But it’s like imagining that show without the high stakes, the violent confrontations or Kevin Costner’s star power; the most attention-grabbing guest star of the latest season of “Heartland” was a zorse.

After stumbling onto it, one U.S. blogger, Anthony Del Vecchio, wrote about the show almost a decade ago under the heading “My Girlfriend Made Me Watch This,” and described being won over.

“The show has an underlying theme of healing through love and compassion and there’s not an ironic bone in the show’s DNA … a refreshing change of pace among the cynicism that seems to be permeating the American television landscape,” he wrote, likening it to American fare such as “Seventh Heaven” and “Gilmore Girls” without the endearing/exhausting rat-a-tat dialogue of the latter or the religious moralism of the former.

“I like that the show’s about the relationship between people and animals, but I also like the fact that it’s a multi-generational family show living under one roof,” said U.S. fan Denise Cornelius, whose own upbringing was likewise with grandparents present. The 44-year-old marketing director for Yahoo, based in Virginia, loves family-friendly fare (along with “Bridgerton” and “The 100”) and has a horse of her own, and reckons both are why the Netflix algorithm offered the show up to her.

“I was washing dishes,” said 28-year-old Floridian Andrew Bjork, recalling when Netflix’s landing page pitched him on “Heartland.” He was soon pulled in by the “beautiful scenery” and the show’s penchant for shooting on film but also started appreciating the actors’ chemistry — they simply “seem to get along with one another.”

Giving Americans with various streaming subscriptions and viewing habits a chance to discover the show was very much the plan for “Heartland” executive producer Jordy Randall. He notes that the show has been available nonexclusively on a variety of U.S. platforms — Netflix; Hulu; UPtv, a broadcaster/streamer; ad-supported streaming channels from FilmRise — with a goal in mind.

“That was a conscious choice to try to broaden the audience,” he said. “This does not make a bunch of money, which is the odd thing … I think what it does is it builds brand loyalty and it builds stability … If we get to do Season 17, for example, I know there will be a home for the show in the U.S. in addition to Canada.”

All the availability “wouldn’t matter if they didn’t like it,” Randall added, pointing out that the huge library of episodes is a big reward for new fans. He suggests a common experience is a 12-year-old girl who loves horses: “she will go onto CBC Gem and start watching the show from Season 1 … It is so rewarding and usually what happens is she starts liking it and then usually the mother will say, ‘Oh, what are you watching?’ … it’s because it’s all there that we can build a brand new audience every year.”

Fan Cornelius concurs, suggesting that by the time U.S. streaming viewers found it, “it was already like five seasons in so you could binge-watch it … and people really like that here, the ability to watch a show (at length) without any interruption.”

Canadians who reliably tune in still for “Coronation Street” need no education on the charms of a low-stakes, long-running show whose characters have deep histories. And while Canadian ratings are hard to come by, “Heartland” has certainly kept a following here, which might explain why CBC is pulling it off of Netflix in this country at month’s end; viewers aiming to binge must head to the corporation’s own service, Gem.

Binge viewing can turn character evolution that took place over years into a more striking change observed over months. Bjork mentioned the satisfaction of watching Tim (Chris Potter) “go from absentee dad to him winning back his father-in-law’s trust.”

Cornelius agreed: “I remember at the beginning that Jack just didn’t like him. To have Jack respect him and be the person — in the last episode Tim is telling Jack to do the right thing — I never thought I would see the day that it wouldn’t be any other way around.”

It’s an intriguing irony that streaming and modern TV’s endless options let American viewers indulge a taste for a distinctly old-fashioned show compared by both Brioux and Del Vecchio to “Little House on the Prairie.” The former writer — noting that the much praised new arrival “Poker Face” is “‘The Fugitive’ meets ‘Columbo’ … the storytelling is almost identical” — thinks retro sensibilities are having a moment.

“There’s so much damn TV out there to cover, yet I’m still looking at ‘The Beverly Hillbillies’ on Tubi … peak TV has kind of hit the wall, right?”

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