‘Moonshine’ Review: CW’s Knockabout Nova Scotia Dramedy

The kernel of the conflict stirring the mixed nuts of “Moonshine” is that hippies had kids. Ken and Bea Finley-Cullen ( Peter MacNeill and Corrine Koslo ) have for years operated the ever-so-ramshackle Moonshine lake resort in fictional Foxton, Nova Scotia, where they reared their barefoot brood and watched them grow into various varieties of delinquency. Statistically, one of the many kids was bound to turn out “normal,” and the rest of the sibs resent her. It is a clever concept for a dysfunctional family dramedy, despite its echoes of “The Munsters.”

The dialogue in the series is a hair too smart to be believable, but it maintains a welcoming pace considering all that’s going on. Lidia ( Jennifer Finnigan ), eldest of the three Finley-Cullen sisters and a successful New York architect, is just returning home for her Aunt Felicia’s memorial; Felicia’s house trailer is assessed by one of Lidia’s children as having all the charm of a meth lab, but Lidia defends the dead. “She was a shunned lesbian with undiagnosed bipolarism forced to turn to grain alcohol and ‘Jeopardy!’ to cope.” We might not all know a Felicia, but we get the picture immediately.

Lidia is a tad slower about her husband, Dan (Jonathan Silverman, who has “early exit” written all over him). Dan is on “standby out of Newark” (the title of episode 1), which starts Bea to clucking; she believes him not. He’s up to something. When the long-awaited magazine feature about their firm is published, with Lidia and Dan—and their intern—on the cover of the magazine, the intern’s adoring gaze at Dan is a giveaway. (Lidia accuses the absent intern of “eye-banging my husband.”) Dan, who has a decidedly punchable face, does get punched, and by several Finley-Cullens, before beating a retreat back to New York and his paramour. Felicia, meanwhile, agitating from beyond the grave (or rather the urn), has left her 43% of the Moonshine to Lidia. The inheritance game is afoot.

There weren’t many episodes made available for review, but “Moonshine,” a Canadian production that was first aired up north in 2021, is amiable enough, with an abundant population of characters and some amusing people playing them— Anastasia Phillips, for instance, as Rhian, the extremely resentful-of-the-beautiful-Lidia sister who always seems to be angrily riding her lawn mover around the Moonshine, furiously cutting the grass or being furious; Nora ( Emma Hunter ) is more sardonic, and vents her spleen as the host of a local morning radio show on the local station. Ryan (Tom Stevens ), their aging party-boy brother, is just out of rehab and already growing magic mushrooms in the Moonshine greenhouse. They have a greenhouse? Of course the Finley-Cullens have a greenhouse.

—Mr. Anderson is the Journal’s TV critic.