YAGA arrived on AMC+ on Friday 23 October 2026 with an 80% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes, counted from five reviews. Five is a small sample and the number will move. The format and the cast are already fixed, and both are unusual enough to be worth knowing before you start episode one.
The show is a Canadian horror mystery adapted from a play, which explains its shape. Eight episodes at roughly half an hour each add up to about four hours of story, closer to a long film than to a ten-episode season.
What YAGA is
YAGA is an eight-part Canadian horror mystery on AMC+, written by Kat Sandler from her own 2019 play and set in a coastal town where a private investigator looks into the disappearance of a fisheries heir. Each episode runs about 30 minutes, and the first critic reviews landed on 22 October 2026, a day before release.
| Detail | Fact |
|---|---|
| Format | Eight episodes, about 30 minutes each |
| Platform | AMC+ |
| Premiere | 23 October 2026 |
| Creator | Kat Sandler, adapting her 2019 play |
| Leads | Carrie-Anne Moss, Noah Reid, Clark Backo, Hudson Williams |
| Also starring | Ezra Franky, Patrick Gilmore, Sheila McCarthy, Megan Follows, Katharine Isabelle |
| Score as of 22 October | 80% from five verified critic reviews, no audience score yet |
The Baba Yaga underneath the story
The title comes from Slavic folklore. Baba Yaga is usually drawn as a ferocious old woman who flies in a wooden mortar and steers with a pestle, lives deep in a forest in a hut that stands on chicken legs, and surrounds the place with a fence made of bones and skulls. She is not a simple villain in the stories. She is a test, and the people who meet her either answer her questions or fail them.
The series moves that figure into a small fishing town. Moss plays Rapp, a private investigator looking for Henry Park, the heir to a commercial fishery. Rapp meets Carson, a local detective, and Katherine, a university professor with a taste for younger men, and the case turns on ancient magic rather than on money. AMC’s logline calls it a psychological descent into witchcraft, power and seduction.
What the first critics said
- Andy Behbakht at ScreenRant, CBR’s sister site, wrote that with each episode at the 30-minute mark “the drama doesn’t get stuck” and the premise develops quickly.
- Rob Owen at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review called it “a pretty good yarn that mixes humor with hints of supernatural elements”.
- Lyra Hale at Fangirlish described it as “a witty, twisted, sexy supernatural thriller” that leaves you with a creeping sense of dread.
Two of those three are about tone rather than plot, which is what you would expect from a first wave of reviews on a show with a folklore premise and a comic streak.
Why an 80% from five reviews is not a verdict
With five reviews, each one is worth 20 percentage points. Four positive reviews and one negative reads as 80%. One more negative review takes the same show to 67%, and a second takes it to 50%.
Early reviews also come from critics who were given the whole season in advance, which tends to favour shows that hold together across episodes and penalises anything that opens slowly. Neither group is representative of a general audience, and Rotten Tomatoes has not compiled an audience score yet because the show had not been released when the reviews went up. Wait for twenty reviews before treating the number as information.
Half-hour episodes change how a mystery reads
A 30-minute episode has no room for a subplot that goes nowhere. Eight of them is a four-hour story, which is roughly the length of a feature film trilogy and about a third of a standard streaming season. For a folklore premise that is an advantage, because the folklore does the world-building and the running time can go on the case.
The risk is the opposite one. Four hours is not enough to establish a town, a detective, a professor and a mythology unless the writing is tight from the first scene, and the reviews suggest it is tight rather than generous.
What I would check before pressing play
- Decide whether you want a four-hour commitment in one sitting, because the format invites it.
- Check that AMC+ is carried where you are. It is the show’s home in the United States and Canada, and other markets usually follow once a season has finished.
- Ignore the percentage until the sample passes twenty reviews, and read the two or three longest reviews instead.
My position is that the cast and the running time are the reasons to start. Carrie-Anne Moss in a folklore mystery with no filler episodes is a better pitch than any score out of five reviews, and the show will still be there when the number settles.
Source: CBR’s report of 22 October 2026.
For a horror recommendation with a finished ending, I wrote about four horror novels for late October. If you would rather watch something with a longer runway, The Terminal List season 2 has a watch-order problem worth knowing about first.
