The Canada-U.K. coproduction Geek Girl defied expectations with a massive audience in its international launch on Netflix this year.

The 10 x 30-minutes series, produced by Toronto’s Aircraft Pictures and London’s RubyRock Pictures, takes inspiration from British author Holly Smale’s Geek Girl book series.

The show, directed by Ireland’s Declan O’Dwyer, follows an awkward teenager played by English actor Emily Carey as she becomes noticed by the fashion world and picked out as a model. The lead writers on the series are Smale, Jess Ruston, Sameera Steward and Sarah Morgan.

The series dropped on Netflix worldwide, excluding Canada, on May 30 and landed at No. 7 on its global top 10 for English TV series on the week of its release. It later jumped to No. 2 on its second week and only fell out of the top 10 after week four.

According to a Netflix engagement report that covers views from January to June 2024, Geek Girl ranked 68 out of roughly 6,800 titles with 102.3 million hours watched and 18.2 million views accrued in its first month on the platform.

“We knew it was based on a very popular book series, so there was definitely a baked-in audience for it already,” Anthony Leo, co-founder and co-president of Aircraft Pictures, tells Playback. “Don’t ask us how it skyrocketed to that level so quickly, that’s still a mystery to us. But we’re very proud of the work we did on it.”

Fellow Aircraft co-founder and co-president Andrew Rosen, who produced Geek Girl along with Leo, says he believes the simultaneous international release on Netflix partially explains the show’s success.

“We do a lot of kids television,” says Rosen. “You’re selling it to different channels around the world to make up that budget. So, it’s very hard to get that mass viewing all at once. This was one of our first shows that was shown day and date and people could hear about it and spread the word.”

In Canada, the series is exclusively available to stream on multi-channel service StackTV on May 30, and was broadcast on Corus-owned channel YTV in September. According to Corus, Geek Girl was the No. 1 first-streamed kids program and a top five first-streamed show on StackTV during the first seven days on the platform.

On Nov. 30, the series debuted on Netflix in Canada as well. Netflix’s exclusivity window ends in 2026, said a Corus spokesperson, with second window rights handled by Nelvana. Corus did not disclose its distribution strategy for 2026.

Another important aspect of the series is its portrayal of neurodiversity. After writing the book, Smale was diagnosed with autism and dyspraxia and retroactively realized that she had written her experiences as a person with those conditions into the book’s main character.

This meant that the production had to find a way to portray neurodiversity in a responsible and positive way, which began with making sure the main character was played by a neurodiverse actor.

“That was a really delicate thing to manage properly,” says Zoë Rocha, founder of RubyRock Pictures and creative producer on Geek Girl. “It was really important that we found the right person to embody the character.”

Rocha says that Carey, who is neurodivergent, fit the role perfectly. For the other roles, Rocha says that for any neurodiverse-coded characters it was important that a neurodiverse actor portrayed them.

The series was developed by Waterside Studios, Corus’s former youth scripted division, headed by executive producer Jeff Norton, in collaboration with Nelvana. Norton left Corus in February as part of a restructuring of the broadcaster’s content leadership team.

Norton, who brought the IP to Corus and Netflix, initially discovered the book in 2013 when touring with his novel MetaWars. Norton later optioned the book, but was unable to find a buyer until Corus and Netflix showed interest in the project.

Norton looked to Rocha’s RubyRock Pictures to develop the series and lead the show creatively with Waterside, which served as the studio.

“One of the things [the series] needed to have was the right writer and the right voice,” says Rocha. “We worked really closely with Holly and Jeff to find who those writers would be.”

Rocha says they brought Ruston on board to co-create the series with Smale with the two working on a script that was quickly greenlit. Later, Aircraft Pictures was brought on as the Canadian partner for the U.K. treaty coproduction.

The series was partially filmed in Ottawa, and Leo and Rosen were excited that the city got to portray itself.

“We got a big kick out of that,” says Leo. “Being able to showcase so many Canadian symbols and depict it as a premium location.”

“The crew was thrilled because normally they don’t shoot Ottawa as Ottawa,” adds Rosen. “There was a huge amount of pride in the crew and the local cast.”

Aircraft Pictures had been acquired by Corus in 2022, but in August, Leo and Rosen entered a binding agreement to repurchase Aircraft’s shares from the company as part of an ongoing push from Corus to raise capital to pay down its $1 billion debt.

“I’d like to think that we will work with them again in the future,” says Leo. “The relationships we built will persevere once [Corus] gets through this tough spot, but we would, in a heartbeat, work with them again.”

Images courtesy of Aircraft Pictures

This story originally appeared in Playback’s 2024 Winter issue