Ten days out from its two-episode AMC+ premiere, Yaga took its NYCC bow — with creator Kat Sandler explaining she wrote Carrie-Anne Moss's Katherine as a female antihero in the Hannibal and Dexter mold.
The witch arrives in ten days. Carrie-Anne Moss previews Yaga in person at New York Comic Con just before the Baba Yaga mystery lands: AMC+'s contemporary mystery thriller, built on the Slavic legend of Baba Yaga, premieres with two episodes on Friday, October 23, exclusively on AMC+ in the United States — and at NYCC its creator explained exactly what kind of monster story this is, and what kind it is not. AMC+ set the date and format in its official announcement, carried by The Futon Critic and mxdwn Television, and TV Insider's NYCC studio interviews supplied the creative detail.
The Premise: A Missing Heir, a Coastal Town, an Old Myth
Per AMC+'s official logline, Yaga follows Rapp, a private investigator played by Noah Reid, who arrives in the small coastal town of Whittock to investigate the disappearance of Henry Park, the young heir to a powerful fishery, played by Hudson Williams. There Rapp finds himself at odds with Carson, an apprehensive local detective played by Clark Backo; with Katherine, a charismatic university professor played by Carrie-Anne Moss; and with what the logline calls a labyrinth of enigmatic suspects, secret lives and ancient magic. A sneak peek clip released by AMC+ opens the story with Rapp's arrival in the isolated town by helicopter and the local police assigning him help — the classic outsider-investigator setup, with folklore waiting underneath it.
The series runs eight half-hour episodes. After the two-episode premiere on October 23, new episodes debut on Fridays, and the season closes with a two-episode finale on Friday, November 27. In Canada the series airs on Crave. Before any of that, Yaga had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 17, and its October 9 NYCC panel screened exclusive content — an unusually festival-forward rollout for a half-hour genre series, and a sign AMC+ is positioning it as a prestige mystery rather than filler horror.
From Stage Play to Screen — and Katherine, the Antihero
Yaga is based on the well-received stage play by Kat Sandler, who serves as the series' writer, showrunner and executive producer. At NYCC, in comments reported by TV Insider, Sandler explained that when she created Katherine — Moss's professor — she wanted a female antihero along the lines of Hannibal Lecter or Dexter Morgan: someone extremely smart, powerful and operating by her own moral code, and not necessarily good. She pushed back on the expectation that female characters be defined by goodness or saintliness, saying she wanted a character whose badness the audience could enjoy along with her. She also noted the character has softer sides alongside the manipulative ones — a combination that makes Katherine the story's prime suspect, its femme fatale and its wild card in one part.
That casting is the show's headline. Moss — Trinity in The Matrix films, and an actor with a long record of playing controlled, unreadable authority — is the gravitational center of the ensemble, and the antihero framing tells viewers how to watch her: not as the mystery's answer key, but as its most interesting question. Around her, the cast mixes Reid's everyman investigator, Backo's local detective and Williams in his first major role following Heated Rivalry, who joined the series in February 2026, as revealed during the NYCC panel per TV Insider. Additional cast includes Sheila McCarthy, Megan Follows, Ezra Franky, Patrick Gilmore, Katharine Isabelle, Hiro Kanagawa, Emilija Baranac, Georgia Acken, Anisa Harris and Sam Krochmal, per AMC+'s announcement.
Why a Half-Hour Witch Hunt Is a Smart Bet
The format is the quiet headline here. Horror and mystery have largely lived in hour-long chapters, but Yaga's eight half-hours amount to a tight, bingeable four-hour story — closer to a long film cut into hooks than a sprawling season. Combined with the Baba Yaga reimagining — taking a figure from Slavic folklore, the witch in the hut on chicken legs who tests travelers and punishes the unworthy, and dropping her logic into a modern coastal town with a missing rich kid — the show is built to be argued about weekly: who is Katherine, what does the town know, and how literally should the ancient magic be read?
AMC+ has form in this lane, as the streaming home of the Walking Dead universe and a steady line of atmospheric genre series — including, elsewhere in this week's coverage, the final-season rollout for Daryl Dixon on our TV front. Yaga gives that slate something different: a contained, single-season-feeling mystery with a movie star at its center and a folk tale for a spine. It premieres October 23 with two episodes, right in the heart of Halloween season, which is plainly not an accident; we will review the launch as it lands. Browse the full slate at browse, check coming soon for the fall calendar, and catch the day's other entertainment headlines on the news front.
Sources · 3 sources
Reporting based on AMC+'s official premiere announcement as carried by The Futon Critic and mxdwn Television, with the NYCC antihero discussion and casting-reveal details from TV Insider's New York Comic Con coverage. Facts cross-checked across at least two outlets before publication.
