Twenty seasons is not a milestone in Canadian television. It is an outlier.
Heartland is shooting its twentieth season around High River and Millarville this summer, which makes it the longest running one hour scripted drama this country has produced. It airs in more than 120 countries. In 2023 it was the ninth most streamed television show in the United States.
All of it made an hour south of Calgary, in the same country, with a great many of the same people.
What twenty seasons buys a place
Shaun Johnston, who has played Jack Bartlett since the beginning and grew up on a farm at Ponoka, put it plainly. “It’s the Holy Grail as far as my industry is concerned.”
He is talking about job security, and it is worth sitting with what that means in this business. A film crew is a small town that assembles for four months and then dissolves. People take the next thing wherever the next thing is, and if the next thing is in Vancouver often enough, they move to Vancouver. That is how a province loses a trade it spent years building, one household at a time, without anybody writing about it.
Twenty seasons is the opposite of that. Twenty seasons means a camera assistant could take the job at 24 and still be on the show at 44. It means a hairdresser in High River has an actual career rather than a run of gigs. It means the local ranch supplying the horses knows what next summer looks like.
Mark Haroun, the showrunner, is from St. Albert and started on this show as a junior writer two decades ago. That progression is not available in a place that only gets visiting productions.
The economics nobody itemizes
The figures attached to Heartland are always described rather than counted. Hundreds of millions in economic activity. Thousands of local jobs over the run. Tourists who come specifically to see a place that does not technically exist.
Treat those as the estimates they are. Nobody has published an audited number and it would be careless to pretend otherwise. What can be said with confidence is the shape of it. Twenty seasons of continuous production in one region is a spending pattern no single blockbuster reproduces, because the blockbuster spends more in a season and then never comes back.
This is the argument running underneath every serious conversation about Alberta’s screen sector right now. A sound stage opened in Didsbury on Canada Day for exactly this reason, so that work outside the cities has somewhere to go on an interior day. And a prairie hamlet has spent years turning itself into Alberta’s own Hollywood on the strength of a single production history. Repetition is the whole asset.
Hudson is not on any map
The show is set in the fictional town of Hudson, Alberta. People fly here to find it.
They land in Calgary, drive south, and go looking for a place assembled out of High River storefronts, Millarville country and twenty years of careful continuity. High River knows exactly what it has. So does every operator along that road who has learned to recognise a certain kind of visitor asking a certain kind of question.
There is something very Albertan about the fact that this province’s most successful cultural export is a show about a family keeping a ranch running through one hardship after another without making speeches about it. Nobody set out to build a tourism strategy. Somebody set out to make a good show about horses and the foothills, and then did it for twenty years without dropping the standard.
The part worth worrying about
One show carrying this much of a province’s screen identity is a concentration risk, and it is worth saying out loud in a week when everyone is celebrating.
Heartland will end. Every show does. The question for Alberta is whether the crews, the facilities, the wranglers and the location managers this show trained have somewhere to go on the day it wraps for the last time, or whether the province wakes up to find that twenty years of expertise had exactly one employer.
That is not an argument against celebrating. It is an argument for building the second one, and the third, while the first is still running.
Season twenty premieres October 4.
Is Heartland Alberta’s best cultural export, or has it become the only one most of us can name?
