Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Lake’ On Prime Video, A Comedy About A Teen, Her Gay Biological Dad, And Canadian Cabin Culture

How many shows have we seen take place over a summer at a lake or some other resort area, with teens meeting and coming of age? The Lake is definitely in that genre, but it also has the added layer of a) being really funny and b) about a man who is trying to reconnect with the daughter he made available for adoption when he was a teenager. She’s now a teen herself and isn’t quite sure what to make of him. Oh, and there’s the cabin culture up in Canada, where it seems like things are a bit more wild than one might think.

THE LAKE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A teen girl is in the front seat of a car, feet up on the dash, complaining to her parents that “You’re flying business class and I’m stuck here?

The Gist: “Here” is in a Canadian lake resort town, and 16-year-old Billie Barnes (Madison Shamoun) is annoyed that she’s not at home or with her parents on their book tour. But they felt a summer with her birth father would be good for her. She’s never met her birth father, Justin Lovejoy (Jordan Gavaris), except on FaceTime, but her parents felt that an open adoption was important. Now they’re at a general store, about to spend a summer at the lake where Justin spent all his summers as a kid.

Justin got his best friend pregnant when he was a teenager, and then moved to Australia after his coming out and giving up Billie engendered massive disapproval from his father. He’s back after a divorce, and wants to connect with Billie. Billie would rather be anywhere but there, and doesn’t think any less when they enter the weird cabin they rented or meet their neighbor Urika (Carolyn Scott). But Justin takes her to the cabin his dad owned and supposedly sold after he left, and they meet Victor Lin (Terry Chen) and his son Killian (Jared Scott), who live at the cabin and invite them to the boathouse barbecue that night.

At the boathouse party, he finds out that the cabin is actually owned by Victor’s wife Maisy-May (Juilia Stiles) — who is Justin’s stepsister. Turns out that his dad never sold the cabin and left it for Maisy-May in the will. In the meantime, Billie, already attracted to Killian, gets into a tilting challenge (i.e. canoe jousting) with three obnoxious neighbor girls and gets stupid drunk. To defend her, Justin also gets drunk and challenges Maisy-May to a tilting contest for the rights to the cabin. Tilting champ Victor subs in and says he’ll make it look good, but a near-puking Justin just dives in the dark lake.

The next day, both of them hung over like crazy, Killian drops off some items from the cabin, and Justin finds out that there’s a way he can get the cabin back.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The Lake surely has the sensibility of most of today’s best Canadian comedies, like Schitt’s Creek, Jann and Workin’ Moms. But there also is the theme of reconnecting with long-lost family, like in Surviving Summer. There are also shades of Everything Is Going To Be Okay.

Our Take: The reason why The Lake, created and written by Julian Doucet, reminds us of the Canadian shows we cited above isn’t just because of their country of origin. There’s an intelligence to the comedy that they all share, along with just enough outlandishness and naughtiness mixed in.

Do we have a few issues with the fact that Billie’s parents trust her with Justin for an entire summer, given that she’s never met him in person and he’s spent the bulk of her life on the other side of the world? Sure. But in the realm of outlandish sitcom premises, this one doesn’t even come close to the middle of that scale. It takes a slight hop of faith to accept this circumstance, but once you do, it’s easy to let the funny stuff shine through.

Gavaris has always been funny, whether he’s sporting a British accent (Orphan Black) or his own Canadian lilt, and he makes the most of Justin, who is not only trying to bond with Billie in his own way — he says she’s her father, which she corrects to “birth father”, but also doesn’t try to discipline her or be dad-like — but has to contend with his family history in a place where he’s still pretty well known.

For instance, neighbors Wayne (Natalie Lisinska) and Jayne (Natalie Lisinska) know the whole history because they grew up on the lake, too; their girls Jeri (Emily Roman), Teri (Brielle Robillard), Keri (Kaitlyn Bernard) are the ones who challenged Billie to the tilt, with their sister Olive (Julia Lalonde) just watching.

So there’s going to be Justin’s history, his desire to get the cabin back, his relationship with Billie, and the overall insular nature of Canadian cabin culture as fodder, and the first episode is a promising mix of character-driven jokes and actual heartfelt story arcs. A line that gave us a great indication of how smart the show can be was when Billie told Justin that for her, breaking into Justin’s old family cabin is “More of a When They See Us adventure than a Wet Hot American Summer shenanigan.”

Sex and Skin: None, and despite the show’s liberal use of language, we’re expecting not to see much more than just kissing or maybe some post-coitus sleeping.

Parting Shot: Justin tells Billie that they need to find a way to get Billie to leave so he gets the cabin, according to his dad’s amended will. “And then what?” she asks. “And then we get what’s ours, because your birth dad ain’t nobody’s bitch.” Billie rolls her eyes.

Sleeper Star: Julia Stiles is always welcome on our screens, and it seems like she’s playing Maisy-May as someone who seems sympathetic to Justin not getting the cabin, but actually will ruthlessly protect what’s hers.

Most Pilot-y Line: We like this line Justin said about the boathouse: “It’s as if the PTA ran a daycare for functional alcoholics.” But it’s so much to unpack that we couldn’t quite wrap our minds around it before the show was on to the next thing.

Our Call: STREAM IT. The Lake is a coming-of-age show that isn’t trying to be for kids, but is also trying to tell a multi-layered story with smart, character-driven jokes, which it succeeds to do most of the time.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.