In the CBC comedy series, based on comedian Mark Critch's childhood in Canada and his bestselling memoirs, Critch plays his own father Mike and Benjamin Evan Ainsworth plays a young Mark.
Malcolm McDowell plays his grandfather, Pop; Claire Rankin plays his mother, Mary; Colton Gobbo plays his older brother Mike Jr; Mark Rivera is his best friend, Ritche; and Sophia Powers is Fox, Mark's girlfriend. Shawn Doyle (The Expanse) joins as drama teacher Kevin Lewis, who influenced Critch to become an artist.
In season four, we see fourteen-year-old Mark and his friends don new mauve blazers as they enter high school during a time of change for Newfoundland, where local seafood factories begin to close and the province begins to modernize. Becoming Home Mike Sr. and Jr. faces a challenge when the owner of the radio station they work at retires and sells to the ambitious Mr. Barlett (Rick Mercer).
The trailer opens with Mark brooding over the fact that his new uniform has the previous school name, Holy Heart of Mary School For Girls, stitched into the blazer. "Nobody's going to be able to read that," Mary counters, before Mike Jr. teases him about this.
There’s more on Mark’s burgeoning relationship with Fox, who befriends a school bully, and we see Mr Lewis tell Mark he is an actor. As the trailer comes to an end, Mike tells Mark, “You know a ship is always safe when it’s tied up at the dock, but that’s not what it’s made for,” before voiceover from adult Mark says, “Like a ship on the ocean, if you don’t get lost, you’ll never be found.”
“This season is almost like a reboot of the whole series,” said Critch, who co-creates and co-showruns the series with Tim McAliffe. “We have a new school, new uniform and, really, a new Mark. But the biggest thing about this year for young Mark — and for me in 1990 — is meeting Kevin Lewis, my theater arts teacher. He really encouraged me to become an actor, to become a comedian.”
Watch the trailer below.