Netflix will launch Below on Oct. 8, putting Josh Hartnett at the center of a six-episode miniseries that drops him into a Newfoundland village where the ground rules have already started to collapse. Hartnett plays Calvin Penney, a man whose family has lived in Snooks Arm for 40 years and who still goes out in an old fishing boat to gather chunks of polar ice for a local vodka distillery.
That setup is the hook, but it is not the whole story. The ice Calvin brings in is supposed to come from glaciers that calve off and drift south into Snooks Arm's waters, yet his latest find is something else entirely. By then, the town has already been stripped of the reasons it once existed by climate change and overfishing, which makes every trip onto the water feel less like work than a test of how much longer the place can hold together.
That is why Below is landing in search results now: viewers want the release date, the role Hartnett is playing, and the shape of the threat surrounding him. Jesse McKeown, the Canadian showrunner who is best known for writing for The Umbrella Academy and Letterkenny, has described the series as Jaws set in rural Newfoundland, and the comparison fits the story’s appetite for danger inside a small, isolated community.
Below also draws on a harder piece of Newfoundland history. It opens in the '60s, when Canadian fisheries began to modernize and many rural Newfoundlanders were resettled into designated growth centers. In some cases, that meant houses being moved over the water by boat, and one of the first images in the series shows Calvin as a young boy riding a rowboat with his family home in tow. McKeown has said the resettlement program has been a major part of the last 75 years, and that it still continues today.
That history matters because Snooks Arm is not just dealing with one strange thing in the water. The town is already under pressure from climate change, overfishing and the possibility of resettlement, with a local meeting even turning into a debate over whether residents should accept a provincial offer to move. Below turns that squeeze into drama by making the community choose between staying put and leaving, while the new threat underneath the surface makes the choice feel even more final.
The question after Oct. 8 is not whether Below has set up its world. It is whether Calvin, and the town around him, can face what is in the water before the current of history carries them away for good.
