On That Note

There isn’t a lot of singing in Frontier, which debuted on Netflix in 2016. With each episode, the show about the eighteenth-century fur trade attempts to prove that the pages of Canadian history conceal enough intrigue to sustain prestige-ish television. (Three seasons’ worth, anyway.) Starring the towering, glowering, sometime superhero Jason Momoa as Declan Harp — a half-Irish, half-Cree thorn in the side of the Hudson’s Bay Company — Frontier has blood, sex, revenge, and double-crosses. But, except for a few bars half hummed by its lone Canadien character, Jean-Marc Rivard, no one ever seems to break into song.

A fur trade with so little music (and so little French) would likely leave Sébastien Langlois and Jean-François Létourneau, the authors of En montant la rivière (Going up the river), scratching their heads. In their telling, the only thing more Québécois than two folk music fans meeting in a hockey locker room and deciding to...