Ally Pankiw, the Schitt’s Creek writer who opened two seasons of Black Mirror

Ally Pankiw

Photo: Patrick.suechan / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	November 14, 1986 Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Occupation	Film and television director, screenwriter
Known for	I Used to Be Funny
Awards	Inside Out Film Festival Audience

Charlie Brooker has now handed Ally Pankiw the opening episode of two different Black Mirror seasons. The first, Joan Is Awful, put Annie Murphy’s ordinary, slightly petty life on a streaming service with Salma Hayek playing her. The second, Common People, turned a life-support subscription into a debt that eats a marriage, and it brought Pankiw a nomination from the Directors Guild of America. For a series that runs on dread, the choice of director says a lot. Pankiw came up through comedy, and she treats the punchline and the wound as the same material.

That habit runs through almost everything she has signed. There is a queer romantic comedy about addiction that she directed from its first scene to its last. There is a feature about a stand-up comedian who can no longer find anything funny. And there is a documentary about the women’s music festival that the late-night hosts of the nineties used as a running gag. Her subjects are usually women the room is laughing at, and her camera stays with them long enough to show what the laugh costs.

She was born Sally Pankiw on November 14, 1986, in Edmonton, and she is from St. Albert, the city on Edmonton’s northern edge. Her family roots are Ukrainian-Jewish. As a child she danced and choreographed, and she has pointed to that early work, arranging bodies in a space for an audience, as one of the things that pushed her toward directing. The other sparks she has named are specific: watching Christopher Guest’s mockumentaries, writing her first short film, editing her first documentary at university and seeing Sofia Coppola at work on a set. She came out as queer in 2008.

Her professional start was in music videos and commercials, first with the collective The Young Astronauts and then through Partizan Midi-Minuit, the Canadian arm of the Partizan production company. Over the years the music roster has included Janelle Monáe, Muna, Arkells, Kira Isabella, Ariana Grande, Phoebe Bridgers and Sabrina Carpenter. The brand side ran from Pepsi, Amazon and Adidas to WestJet, Nylon and Chanel. It was an education in compression: thirty seconds to set a tone, three minutes to tell a story around a song.

Short films came in parallel and travelled the queer and comedy festival circuit, with screenings at Toronto’s Inside Out, Outfest, Frameline and the LA Comedy Fest. Her early career drew support from TIFF, the Harold Greenberg Fund and Bell Media, and she was one of Film Independent’s Directing Lab fellows in 2018 with a feature project called The Hiding House. The Hollywood Reporter put her on its list of the top 15 Canadian talents to watch.

From 2017 she directed the comedy web series Terrific Women for CBC, which earned her a Canadian Comedy Award nomination for best direction in a web series; for CBC Comedy she also made the digital series An Awkward Girl Dates. In the same period she joined the writers’ room of Schitt’s Creek as a story editor and stayed for two seasons. That room built a working relationship with Dan Levy that would keep paying off years later, and it put her alongside Annie Murphy, who would become her first Black Mirror lead.

Her television directing debut was a full season. Pankiw directed all six episodes of the first series of Feel Good, Mae Martin‘s semi-autobiographical comedy about a Canadian comic in London who falls for Charlotte Ritchie’s George while trying to stay clean, with Lisa Kudrow as Mae’s mother. Channel 4 premiered it in the United Kingdom on March 18, 2020, and Netflix released it worldwide the next day. That first season holds a perfect score on Rotten Tomatoes from 41 reviews. The show’s register, tender and filthy in the same scene, became something like her calling card.

Hulu came next. She directed episodes of Shrill, the Aidy Bryant comedy about a Portland writer who stops apologising for her body, and of The Great, Tony McNamara’s anarchic period satire with Elle Fanning and Nicholas Hoult. Neither show looks much like the other, and that was the point of the stretch: a director who had been filed under web comedy was now handling costume, scale and an ensemble on a prestige set.

Joan Is Awful opened the sixth season of Black Mirror on June 15, 2023. Joan, played by Murphy, discovers that a Netflix-like service called Streamberry has turned her day into a glossy drama starring Salma Hayek, generated almost in real time. The script was finished before ChatGPT reached the public and landed in the middle of the Hollywood writers’ and actors’ strikes, which made its questions about digital likeness and consent sound like the news. Pankiw described the episode as asking “who gets to make art?” and what happens when we consume other people’s stories. The dialogue slips in a nod to Schitt’s Creek, and on set the crew wore pigtails in solidarity with Joan. At the Critics’ Choice Super Awards the episode won best science fiction or fantasy limited series or TV movie, and Murphy won best actress in the category.

Her own feature had been waiting a long time. Pankiw began writing I Used to Be Funny in 2013, and the #MeToo reckoning later widened what the script was about. Rachel Sennott plays Sam Cowell, a Toronto stand-up living with post-traumatic stress disorder, who is pulled back toward her past when Brooke, the teenager she used to nanny, goes missing. Olga Petsa plays Brooke, with Jason Jones, Sabrina Jalees and Caleb Hearon around them. The film was made with support from Telefilm Canada, Ontario Creates and WME Independent.

I Used to Be Funny premiered at South by Southwest on March 13, 2023, in competition for the Grand Jury Award for narrative feature, and won the audience award for best narrative feature at Inside Out in Toronto that June. Utopia released it in American and Canadian cinemas on June 7, 2024. The New York Times and The Globe and Mail both made it a critic’s pick. Rotten Tomatoes’ consensus credited Pankiw’s debut with giving Sennott room to show her dramatic range, and Exclaim! praised her “remarkable command over the tone of her film”, which is the right compliment for a movie that shifts from sitcom rhythm to trauma drama inside a single cut.

Brooker brought her back for the seventh season. Common People, written by Bisha K. Ali and Brooker, premiered on Netflix on April 10, 2025. Rashida Jones plays Amanda, a schoolteacher kept alive after a medical emergency by Rivermind, a subscription service that runs part of her brain from its servers, sold by Tracee Ellis Ross’s cheerful representative, and Chris O’Dowd plays Mike, the husband who keeps paying as the plan gets worse and the adverts start coming out of his wife’s mouth. The episode earned two Emmy nominations, for Jones as lead actress and for Brooker and Ali’s writing. Pankiw herself was nominated at the 78th Directors Guild of America Awards in the limited series and anthology category, alongside Jason Bateman, Antonio Campos, Lesli Linka Glatter and Shannon Murphy.

The documentary came through Levy. When a producer on a Lilith Fair project went looking for a director, Levy, who by then had worked with her on thirteen episodes of Schitt’s Creek, answered, by Pankiw’s account to The Globe and Mail: “Well, have I got the lesbian director for you!” Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery, produced by Levy’s company Not a Real Production, follows Sarah McLachlan’s decision in the late nineties to build an all-female touring festival after radio programmers and promoters kept telling her they could not put two women back to back. Sarah McLachlan, Paula Cole, Sheryl Crow, Brandi Carlile, Erykah Badu, Bonnie Raitt, Jewel and Emmylou Harris appear, along with Olivia Rodrigo as a voice from the generation that grew up after it.

The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 13, 2025, aired on CBC four days later and reached American viewers on Hulu, through ABC News Studios, on September 21. It holds a perfect Rotten Tomatoes score from 17 reviews; in Variety, Chris Willman wrote that Pankiw “does a solid job of setting up the seeds that led to Lilith becoming a cultural phenomenon.” It was nominated for best feature length documentary at the 14th Canadian Screen Awards in 2026. In a personal essay for CBC Arts, Pankiw wrote that she had spent two decades unlearning what the pop culture of her teens taught a young gay woman to think of herself, and that the film showed her women in the arts had been “doing this perpetual unlearning, long before I started.”

Her most recent series work is on Ponies, Peacock’s Cold War spy thriller in which Emilia Clarke and Haley Lu Richardson play two secretaries at the American embassy in Moscow in 1977 who become CIA operatives after their husbands die. Pankiw directed episodes alongside co-creator Susanna Fogel and Viet Nguyen. All eight episodes arrived on January 15, 2026, to strong reviews, and Peacock cancelled the show that June after one season. In 2022 she was also announced as co-creator, with Levy, of Standing By, an animated comedy for Hulu about a group of disgruntled guardian angels.

Pankiw splits her time between Toronto and Los Angeles. The next move is the interesting one. Her only scripted feature took roughly a decade to get from first draft to cinemas, and she made it with little more than a Canadian indie budget and a fast-rising star. She now arrives at a second one with a DGA nomination, two season-opening Black Mirror episodes and a Levy partnership that has already produced a documentary. That résumé buys her something she did not have the first time: the leverage to make the next personal film on her own terms, at a bigger scale.

Tags: Dan Levy, black mirror, Ally Pankiw, Feel Good, Rachel Sennott, I Used to Be Funny

Featured News — Ally Pankiw

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“Joan is Awful” (2023) Black Mirror Season 6 Episode 1

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