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.
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. The format, the platform, the creator and the cast are all fixed, and only the score is still moving.
| 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. She 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.
- Gavia Baker-Whitelaw at TV Guide wrote that the show “injects some witchy themes into a small-town detective story but doesn’t distinguish itself in either regard”, the one negative review among the five.
Three of those 4 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.
The score will settle after 20 reviews
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 2 more take it to 57%.
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 about 2 feature films and roughly half of a 10-episode 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. The reviews suggest it is tight rather than generous. The reverse problem is a long season that keeps going after the story has stopped, which is what happened to Game of Thrones once travel stopped taking time.
3 things to settle before you press 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 it streams on Crave in Canada. Other markets usually follow once a season has finished. Streaming rights expire, which is why Talk to Me left HBO Max on 1 November.
- Ignore the percentage until the sample passes twenty reviews, and read the two or three longest reviews instead.
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.
A horror recommendation with a finished ending is in four horror novels for late October. For something with a longer runway, The Terminal List season 2 has a watch-order problem to sort out first. More film and television arguments sit in Movies and TV.
