'Little Bird' is a Devastating Look at the Sixties Scoop

You don’t need me to tell you how awful things are right now. War. Devastating fires and earthquakes. A political landscape that sends shivers down your spine on the daily. If you are looking for TV to provide you with an escape from the world’s terrors, Little Bird is not the series for you. Distressing, harrowing, and heartbreaking, the series, from Jennifer Podemski and Hannah Moscovitch, is a powerful gut punch. It will leave you shattered.

The six-episode series, which premieres on most local PBS stations after airing in Canada in May 2023, tells the story of Bezhig Little Bird (Darla Contois). When she was five years old, Bezhig was taken from her family in Saskatchewan, adopted by a Jewish one in Montreal, and raised as Esther Rosenblum. Set in the 1960s and 1980s, the series opens with a now-grown Esther at her engagement party to David (Rowen Kahn). She overhears her future mother-in-law (Reagan Pasternak) disparaging her for behaving “like a regular Jew.”

“We don’t know anything about her family. Why was she given up for adoption? What was the problem there? . . . Now she’s going to be a mother of her own, and that’s just going to go fine,” she snarks while a friend comforts her that Esther is one of the “good ones.”