Over the weekend, I was scrolling Instagram past midnight, as is too common an occasion, and was served a Reel of an actor crying in his car because he had booked a part on a television show. I was familiar with the actor from long ago days of YouTube, when he was one of many young people who popped brightly into frame on their brand new channel, announcing themselves with much fanfare, before, usually quite quickly, vanishing without warning. I was glad to see that this mostly forgotten person I’d encountered in a past internet age had found himself some work, but I guessed that the show in question couldn’t be much of anything. 

When I looked up the actor on IMDb, I saw that the series he’d landed was something called The Way Home, a Canadian production for the Hallmark Channel. With that boilerplate title, I assumed that it was just some bland family drama. A name in the credits did distinguish it, though: Andie MacDowell, who starred in Hallmark’s first original series, the light-touch judge drama Cedar Cove, and now has returned to the fold. But what struck me more than MacDowell’s involvement was the premise of the series. My eyes grew wide as I read that The Way Home is about a magic pond that acts as a time travel portal. And it’s run for four seasons. 

Upon reading this, I threw on my dressing gown, grabbed a candle, and ran down the stony hallways of my ancient manor home, desperate to ring the bells in the tower to announce my discovery. Meaning, I tweeted. 

Figuring this was just some random little tidbit I’d thrown out onto the internet for people’s brief amusement, I went to sleep, assuming I’d never think about the magic pond show ever again. But to my surprise the next morning, I awoke to a flurry of replies and quote tweets. They were from fans of this mysterious series, not flaming me for my ignorance but simply insisting that The Way Home is, in fact, a good television series. I initially brushed them off, thinking these were just a few devoted fans. But the responses kept coming all morning, person after person saying, “You don’t understand. It’s one of the best shows on TV.” 

After a few hours, I broke. I marched into the bedroom, announced to my partner Andrew what we’d be watching for the afternoon, and we sat down and pressed play (on Netflix) on the first season of The Way Home. What awaited us we never would have dared to imagine.

Well, okay, a lot of it is imaginable. It’s Canadian and Hallmark, so it is shot in various corners of Ontario—though, it is set in small-town coastal New Brunswick. (As are far too many shows these days. Enough with New Brunswick, Hollyweird!) Most of the actors are unknown to American eyes, save for MacDowell and Chyler Leigh, long late of Grey’s Anatomy, more recently of Supergirl. The show is, as one would expect, on the higher side of low budget (from the look and feel of it, anyway), and the writing is stilted, expository, and repetitive, halfway between regular network drama and daytime soap. It’s lots of emotional conversations at kitchen tables and in generically set-decorated bedrooms and cafes. There is past grief to contend with, present difficulties involving divorce and parenting, and of course love interests. Pretty standard-issue stuff. 

Except, as I mentioned above, there is also an enchanted pond that people can time travel through. Well, okay, at least teenager Ali (Sadie Laflamme-Snow) can do that, a fact she discovers shortly after she is forcibly relocated to the family farm by her out-of-work mom. Ali was rebelling at her high school back in Minneapolis, and so she and her mother Kat (Leigh) decamp to grandma’s house for a fresh start. Kat and her mother, Del (Andie MacDowell, from Multiplicity), have not spoken in many years after some tragedies tore them apart, so everyone is wary of one another as they adjusting to their new life together. 

Reader, do you think those past tragedies will be contended with as season one unfolds? You’d better fuckin believe it, and you’d better fuckin want it, because boy oh boy are those tragedies hashed out and rehashed and then hashed out some more. The gist is that Kat’s kid brother Jacob went missing at a carnival a long time ago (so, yes, the Andie MacDowell time-traveling bog show also involves a child disappearing at a carnival) and was never seen again. Sometime after that, Kat’s beloved father Colton (Jefferson Brown) died, leaving the family in pieces. 

What Kat realizes when she first takes a splash in the bewitched pond is that she has the ability to go back to the summer of 1999, when her mother was a teenager and before anything went wrong. Perhaps she can get to know her mother this way, and maybe, just maybe, avert the family’s primal disaster. 

What ensues is, as the twitter people insisted, rather compelling, a cross-stitching meander through two timelines, as mother and daughter connect as friends when the mother is the daughter’s age, while trying to make sense of life as it is in the present. It’s difficult to grok how this all works exactly—Kat remembers having a friend named Alice (Ali) when she was a teen, and even named her daughter after her, but never quite noticed the fact that the two girls look exactly the same. In the past, Ali(ce) keeps disappearing for sometimes months at a time (the pond sends you back to whenever it wants to send you) only to reemerge sopping wet (because she’s just been in a pond) with the thinnest of explanations for where she was. All the people of 1999 seem to readily accept that this elusive kid just pops up into their lives out of nowhere on occasion like some kind of positively drenched fairy godteen. It’s silly, but easy to abide.

And then one scoots closer to the screen when a charged new plot development arises. The strangest one is that Ali(ce) has a love interest in the past. Meaning, she falls for a guy who is in his 40s in the present day. And is friends with her mom. At some point in the season, in the present, grown Kat and her daughter talk about her daughter’s relationship with grown Kat’s childhood friend. Think about that for a moment, if you’ve the fortitude for it: your mom knows you hooked up with one of her friends because you were all teenagers together when it happened. Kinking up matters further is the presence of Elliot, a nerdy guy who, in the present day, is Ali’s science teacher, but back in 1999 was simply a pal of Kat’s who had a crush on her. He is also the only one who knows that Ali is a pond-hopping time bandit. 

So a high school science teacher has memories of one of his students hanging around with him 25 years ago and dating one of his friends, and now must have heart-to-hearts with said student about that romance even though his friend—who, again, dated one of Elliot’s students in the past—is now middle-aged. The Hallmark Channel has been getting real freaky with it for three years now, right under most of our noses. Let’s see the age-gap puritans tangle with THAT quagmire. 

This strangeness is, well, strangely offset by the more basic, predictable emotional topography of the show, which loops and loops around on its grief motif, episode after episode. That stuff gets pretty dry, but then some odd new narrative path is taken or something with massively dark (though largely unexplored) implications happens and we’re sucked back in.

I will spoil something here: eventually mom Kat starts tossing herself into the pond too, so there are scenes of her watching her daughter hang out with her teenage self and going on double dates with who will eventually become Ali’s dad. Kat also, y’know, sees her long-lost brother when he was a child, and her dead father. I remarked to Andrew that in the real world, Kat would near immediately experience a total psychotic break and probably spend the rest of her life murmuring at the walls in Moncton’s version of Bellevue. 

And yet, the show treats it all as relatively normal. Which is fun. The Way Home is a deeply weird show that seems to have no interest in acknowledging that weirdness. It loves its world and asks only that we agree to its terms. Which I did happily, hour after hour, as Andrew and I grew ever more invested in the Jacob mystery and in the increasingly tangled knot of time-travel paradoxes the show ties for itself. I paused only briefly to make dinner and then it was back to the trials and tribulations of cozy, Stars Hollow-y Port Haven, NB. 

Some of it we teased. We laughed when characters said things like, “The pond has a mind of its own.” We noted with sympathy that Leigh and Laflamme-Snow had to spend so much time at work tromping across fields in damp clothes. We joked that at some point, Andie MacDowell’s character was going to say to her daughter and granddaughter, “You girls know that’s the sceptic tank, right?” And we made many darker jokes about the show’s high (but as yet unrealized) potential for serious sexual taboo. 

But we also genuinely enjoyed the series. We felt its emotional pull, particularly the way it entertains and complicates a common bittersweet fantasy of wanting to return to some before-time in our lives (or the lives of others), when things are remembered or imagined to be easier, better, full of possibility that has not yet been ruined by, y’know, what ended up happening. Also, who hasn’t wondered what their parents were like as kids, how they socialized and wished and transgressed? That curiosity is vicariously slaked, in mostly mellow fashion (until the carnival, anyway), on The Way Home.

And there is an interesting allegory that begins to emerge halfway through season one: Kat becomes addicted to the pond. Her adventuring into the past is a drug she can’t quit, despite all the chaos it’s causing in the here and now. Watching Kat alienate all those around her as she scratches at a satisfaction just out of reach is one of the more effective metaphors for what addiction can do to a family that I’ve yet encountered. (Really.) Creator Heather Conkie and her staff may stall and pander a lot in their writing, but all that repetition gradually amasses into something satisfyingly intricate. And it seems that it only gets more so in subsequent seasons.

You see, when the clock was inching up toward bedtime, I realized something terrible. I, like Kat, didn’t want to stop. And so, as season one ended, I turned to Andrew and said in a small pleading voice, “One more?” He agreed and there we were plunging into season two, which introduces a tantalizing new piece of town lore (there’s a creepy old mansion!) and promises to yank us further back into the past, Outlander style. (Though, I’m guessing without all the sex? But who knows! This show has a degenerate streak just waiting to be truly teased out.) 

We did successfully limit ourselves to only one episode before calling it a night, but now it hangs there in my mind as I write, waiting to be returned to. I am finding myself unbearably hungry for more of Andie MacDowell’s time travel show. Which is all to say, be careful what ponds you tweet about. Because you might just fall in.