09:35 – Barbara and I have started watching Heartland on Netflix streaming. Netflix streaming has only the first two seasons, totaling 31 episodes, but seasons three and four are available on DVD, with season five currently running. I’m not sure if Netflix has those DVDs, but once we near the end of the available episodes I’ll probably add DVDs to our Netflix account. There are several other DVD-only series with new seasons available, so we’ll get DVDs for a few months until we’re caught up with those and then change back to streaming only.
I’m not sure what it is about Canada, but it certainly produces more than its share of really fine young actresses. There is Emily VanCamp, of course, whom I adore, and now Amber Marshall, the lead character in Heartland.
When we started watching Heartland, we knew nothing about it other than the Netflix description. We watch a lot of Canadian series, and this is the first one we’ve watched that didn’t scream “Canadian”. I’m not sure what it is, but I can usually identify a series as Canadian within the first minute or two. It’s not the accent. Maybe something to do with production values. For the first few minutes of the first episode of Heartland, I didn’t really think about it, but if I had I would have just assumed it was a US series. Yes, most of the characters pronounced “ou” as the Canadian “oo” rather than the US “ow”, but that pronunciation is not unique to Canada. Many US residents in the upper plains states sound more Canadian than American in that respect. When one of the characters said something about over the border “in Montana”, that narrowed things down a bit. We knew the series was set in North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, or Idaho. Or perhaps Saskatchewan, Alberta, or British Columbia. Alberta, as it turns out.