The North Pole
The North Pole (2017-2019)
Created by: Josh Healey, Yvan Itturiaga, and Darren Colston
Gentrification has driven U.S. urban development for at least 20 years but shockingly few TV series address it head on. Since the 1990s, mainstream TV comedies and dramas have sold viewers a fantasy of cities renewed: luxurious, safe, and largely white.
Across two seasons, The North Pole flips the script on urban comedy by tackling the racial and class dynamics of gentrification in one of the areas of the country hardest hit by this phenomenon: the Bay Area, specifically North Oakland, known to locals as the “North Pole.”
Each brisk and sharply comedic season tackles a different political era in the United States, the sharp conservative shift in the mid-to-late 2010s. Season one introduces the neighborhood and its gentrification through the series’ three main characters and roommates representing the neighborhood’s racial and ethnic diversity: Benny (Santiago Rosas), Nina (Reyna Amaya), and Marcus (Donte Clark). The three are facing a rent hike they can’t afford as their landlord attempt to keep apace with gentrifying prices. So they seek another roommate and land on Finn (Eli Marienthal), a white guy from the Midwest. Finn works for a “green” tech company, the kind of enterprises that saw increasing funding during the Obama administration (including the likes of Elon Musk). But it’s revealed that Fin’s company is more a Trojan horse for gentrification than climate justice and they all have to rally the neighborhood to protect their land rights.
The first season ends with a twist: Benny is threatened with deportation. It’s a chilling reminder that President Obama executed more deportations than his predecessors.
The second picks up that storyline with Rosario Dawson playing Benny’s lawyer, who gets him released from temporary incarceration so that he can run for sheriff as an undocumented person.
The storyline was influenced by creator and co-writer Yvan Itturiaga’s real life, who told KQED that a friend of his from high school was later arrested and announced his undocumented status.
Ultimately, The North Role affirms the healing power of comedy in its ability to grapple with some of the most traumatic political issues of our time in ways that invite viewers from different identities to see how our struggles intersect.
“If we want to change the politics, we have to change the story,” creator and co-writer Josh Healey wrote on his blog. “We can carry it all. The joy and the pain, the eviction notice and the Tinder date gone horribly wrong. If we want to get serious about changing the world, maybe the best move is to not take ourselves so damn seriously all the time.”