About The Beaverton

The Beaverton

The Beaverton is a Canadian news satire publication, primarily online, with contributors based in Toronto, Montreal, and Whitehorse. Founded in 2010, it publishes news stories, editorials, vox populi pieces, and other formats — including university reviews — whose structure and layout mirror those of conventional newspapers but whose content twists the news into humorous commentary on Canadian and world issues. Frequently compared to The Onion, The Beaverton has grown from a scrappy website into a multimedia satire brand encompassing a national television series, a published book, and millions of annual readers — arguably the most successful Canadian comedy-news enterprise of the digital era.

Overview

The Beaverton's formula is straightforward: take the familiar forms of journalism — the breaking-news story, the sober editorial, the man-on-the-street vox pop, the earnest review — and fill them with fiction calibrated to puncture the pomposities of Canadian public life. Its targets range from federal politics to hockey culture to the peculiar anxieties of Canadian identity, and its headlines have repeatedly gone viral, becoming some of the most-shared pieces of Canadian comedy writing of the past decade. The site's tagline, "North America's Trusted Source of News," is itself the joke: a deadpan claim to authority from a publication that invents everything, delivered with the straight face of a genuinely trusted wire service.

History

The publication was founded in 2010 by Luke Gordon Field and Alex Huntley, alumni of Queen's University, together with University of Toronto graduate Laurent Noonan (1982–2014). Field, a lawyer turned stand-up comedian, became the site's creator and driving force. As he later described it, The Beaverton began as a loose collective — comedians, former journalists, and office workers who had grown up as fans of The Onion, The Daily Show, and the other great satirical news institutions, and who wanted to build a Canadian equivalent of their own.

The site's early years were a grind of daily joke-writing for a small but devoted audience. Breakthrough came through virality: Beaverton headlines began circulating far beyond the site's regular readers, shared by Canadians who recognized their own country in the satire. By 2015, thebeaverton.com was drawing more than 6 million views in a single year, and its biggest hits — stories playing on Canadian insecurities about geography, bilingualism, and small-town decline — had become some of the decade's most viral Canadian "news stories." The site had established itself as a joke-dense, news-of-the-day satire operation with a genuinely national reach.

Television came calling in 2015. That July, Pier 21 Films announced that a pilot for a Beaverton television series was in development, and in June 2016 The Comedy Network confirmed it had picked up the series for the 2016–17 season. The show — a mock television newscast parodying both the content and the form of contemporary TV news — debuted on November 9, 2016, the day after the United States presidential election. Because the first episode had been taped before the election but aired after it, the producers prepared and filmed two different introductions covering both possible outcomes. The series starred Miguel Rivas and Emma Hunter as the anchors, with Laura Cilevitz, Aisha Alfa, Marilla Wex, Dave Barclay, and Donavon Stinson as correspondents, and Field himself appearing as a host of the Beaverton Sports Network segment. Writers included Field, Jeff Detsky, Alexander Saxton, Jacob Duarte Spiel, Kurt Smeaton, Pat Dussault, Nile Séguin, Wendy Litner, and Winter Tekenos Levy. The show was greenlit for a second season in June 2017, and in its third season original episodes began debuting on CTV. The series ran from 2016 to 2019, airing on The Comedy Network and then CTV.

The brand extended to print as well. Field and Huntley co-authored "The Beaverton Presents: Glorious and/or Free — The True History of Canada," published by Penguin Books, carrying the site's satirical voice into a full-length comic history of the country.

Content and Editorial Approach

The Beaverton's content mirrors the sections of a conventional newspaper, each bent toward comedy. Straight news stories report fictional events in the sober register of real journalism; editorials argue absurd positions with utter seriousness; vox populi pieces quote invented ordinary Canadians; and the site's university reviews apply the critical apparatus of arts journalism to institutions of higher learning. The humour is topical, feeding on the day's real headlines, and distinctly Canadian — bilingualism gaffes, hockey sacred cows, Tim Hortons lore, parliamentary absurdities, and the national habit of defining itself against the United States are perennial subjects.

The television series translated this approach to the screen, adopting the format of a mock newscast complete with anchors, field correspondents, and interview guests played by Canadian actors, comedians, and media personalities. The show parodied not just the news but the grammar of television news itself: the urgent graphics, the breathless live hits, the pundit panels — all deployed in service of stories that never happened.

Coverage and Audience

The Beaverton covers Canadian politics, culture, sports, and world events through the lens of satire, with its contributors working from Toronto, Montreal, and Whitehorse — a geographic spread that gives the site voices from central Canada, Quebec, and the North. Its audience is the generation of Canadians raised on The Onion and The Daily Show: younger, digitally native readers who encounter its headlines as shareable social media content. The site's viral breakthroughs demonstrated its ability to reach far beyond the comedy faithful, as its jokes about Canadian life circulated among millions of readers who might never visit the homepage directly. Among its most-shared stories were headlines playing on familiar Canadian anxieties — about geography, language politics, and small-town pride — the kind of premises that readers immediately recognized and passed along, turning individual jokes into national in-conversations.

The book and television extensions broadened that audience further, carrying the brand to readers and viewers who encountered The Beaverton first as a TV show or a Penguin-published humour title rather than as a website.

Ownership

The Beaverton was founded by Luke Gordon Field, Alex Huntley, and Laurent Noonan, and Field — the site's editor and the television show's producer and co-creator — has remained its central figure. A lawyer who left the profession for stand-up comedy, Field has embodied the site's hybrid identity: part journalism, part comedy, run with the seriousness of a newsroom and the irreverence of a comedy club. The television adaptation was produced by Pier 21 Films in association with The Comedy Network (and later CTV), with Field serving as showrunner alongside his web-editor duties. The enterprise has remained an independent comedy operation rather than a division of a larger media conglomerate, growing through the founders' multimedia ambitions rather than through acquisition.

Digital Presence

The Beaverton lives primarily at thebeaverton.com, where its daily satire is published and where its viral hits have drawn millions of views — more than 6 million in 2015 alone, the year the television deal was struck. The site's shareable headlines are its chief distribution mechanism, travelling through social media far beyond its direct readership. The television partnership with The Comedy Network brought a coordinated digital strategy — exclusive online content including podcasts, videos, and articles timed to the series — and the brand maintains the social media presence expected of a digital-native comedy publication. From website to television to book, The Beaverton's digital home remains the foundation of the enterprise.