Where can I watch "Little Fires Everywhere" in Canada?

Little Fire Everywhere, the favourably reviewed eight-part miniseries starring Reese Witherspoon, Kerry Washington, and Joshua Jackson, and based on the novel by Celeste Ng, premiered on March 17, 2020 on Hulu in the United States.

Unfortunately, Hulu is not available in Canada and no Canadian outlet was announced for several weeks, despite high demand in this country.

It was later announced that Amazon Prime Video had acquired rights to the series in much of the world including Canada. It is now available for streaming on that service in Canada, as it has been since Friday, May 22, 2020.

Little Fires Everywhere is included at no extra charge in the base-level Prime Video library included with Amazon Prime (affiliate link), the online retailer's membership program that also includes free delivery options, which costs $9.99 per month or $99.00 per year in Canada (plus applicable sales tax, as of April 2022), with a one month free trial for new subscribers (offer varies slightly in Quebec).

Why wasn't it picked up in Canada sooner?

While many Hulu original series have been quickly picked up in Canada, Hulu does not currently have an overall output deal for its programming similar to American pay TV channels like HBO or Showtime, both of which have deals that send almost all of their programs automatically to Crave in Canada.

Instead, Canadian channels and services must negotiate individually for programs with their international distributors – usually, but not always, a corporate sibling of the show's main production company. (For information on other Hulu series, see our separate post here.)

Ultimately it comes down to broadcasters and streaming services negotiating with distributors – the first group trying to get programs that they think their audiences will be interested in, and the second trying to get maximum value (i.e. money) to recoup the production costs of a program and potentially even profit. The two sides often see eye-to-eye, but not always.

The main studio involved in production of Little Fires Everywhere is ABC Signature Studios, part of The Walt Disney Company (as is, since 2019, Hulu itself). In the end, it was Amazon that was able to strike a deal for international rights to the series – and unlike domestic Canadian broadcasters, it had the leverage of an international operation to ensure the program has a consistent home in most of the (non-U.S.) world.

Can I just buy the show on a site like iTunes?

Unfortunately, at last check there was no digital purchase option like that available right now in Canada.

In many (though not necessarily all) cases, the distributor will work to get the show distributed through a TV channel or streaming service first, and hold off on digital sales until after that's occurred.

Now that it's been released on a streaming service in Canada, it may be available for digital purchase in the near future.

There are, y'know, other ways I could get a show like this, right?

We're not oblivious to their existence, but we don't recommend them.

Significant revisions

• April 10, 2022: Updated pricing of Amazon Prime in Canada
• July 20, 2020: Link updates and cleanup of deleted tweets.
• June 3, 2020: Minor updates & clarifications.
• May 8, 2020: Added information about Prime Video picking up the show in Canada. Removed a few sections that are now superfluous.