The past year has been more than “sort of” groundbreaking for Bilal Baig and director Fab Filippo — it’s been a resounding smash.

The creators of the CBC and HBO Max original series Sort Of have earned several accolades for the series’ first season – including a prestigious Peabody, a Banff Rockie Award for Program of the Year, and Best Comedy at the Canadian Screen Awards – since its premiere in fall 2021.

“It’s a very cross-sectional show, and not only that, but there’s a gentleness to the voice that I think people are hungry for right now,” says Filippo, who serves as co-showrunner and executive producer of the series alongside Baig.

It’s also incredibly diverse, adds Baig: “I could look around sometimes and be like, ‘Wow, this really looks like the Toronto I know and some of the spaces I move through,’ with this combination of trans folks, and people of colour, and cis people, and white folks [who] are all tied in together.”

The 8 x 30-minute dramedy, produced by Sphere Media (formerly Sienna Films), stars Baig as a gender-fluid nanny helping a family in crisis while grappling with challenges in their own family.

Critics have praised its approach to queerness, with Baig billed by CBC as the first non-binary lead character on Canadian television and the first South Asian, queer Muslim actor to star in a Canadian primetime TV series. They’ve also been nominated for a Gotham Award for Outstanding Performance in a New Series.

The team paid it forward in season two, which debuted last November, by providing six trans and/or non-binary industry talent with paid training and work placement on set as part of a mentorship program.

Sort Of has also been one of the most-watched comedies on CBC Gem since its debut in fall 2021 and was the top comedy on CBC Gem when season two debuted, according to the pubcaster, which did not disclose specific numbers but cited Adobe Analytics as the source. HBO Max also did not disclose streaming figures for the show, which has earned scores of plaudits in publications including the New York Times, Rolling Stone, NPR, Time and The Cut. A season three renewal was announced in December.

The series has been sold to platforms across the globe by distributors Sphere Media Distribution and Abacus Media Rights, including Netflix in the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore; Sky Comedy in the U.K.; Stan in Australia; M6-Téva in France; and the Nordic Entertainment Group in Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Iceland, Poland and the Baltic countries.

Executive producer Jennifer Kawaja, who heads scripted English content at Sphere Media, says Sort Of – much like the previous projects the team has tackled in the past like Cardinal, The Porter and Trickster – shows that “in Canada, we can make a variety of work and do it, hopefully, in a way that brings out the uniqueness of the stories and who we are.”

Kawaja adds that since the rebrand of the prodco from Sienna Films, the various divisions of Sphere comprising animated, film, unscripted and scripted are collaborating on a variety of projects.

“I think that’s Sphere Media’s challenge moving forward into the next couple of years, is to try to continue producing stories that express the uniqueness of the creators’ voices,” she says.

This story originally appeared in Playback‘s Winter 2022 issue

Photo by Jasper Savage