Director Mike Downie helms an intimate four-part docuseries about The Tragically Hip, as led by his late brother Gord, and how the Canadian rockers came to embody a nation

Plenty of Canadian musicians over the years have achieved monumental success in Canada and abroad, but precious few of them manage to channel the soul of a country so well as a small-town rock band called The Tragically Hip.

Founded in Kingston, Ontario, circa 1984, high school buddies Rob Baker, Paul Langlois, Gord Sinclair, Johnny Fay and Gord Downie formed a group that would leave an indelible mark on our home and native land across four decades of music that was fully, completely Canadian — ending, alas, with the premature death of frontman and peerless rock poet Gord Downie from brain cancer in 2017.

Now, Gord’s older brother Mike Downie, himself an accomplished filmmaker, unveils a four-part docuseries that takes us through the Hip’s beautiful, eccentric, tumultuous journey.

Recently, TV Week got the chance to speak with Mike about crafting an ode to Canada’s band, and his little brother.

TV WEEK: Is the series you’ve made the same as the one you set out to make, or did it change along the way?

MIKE DOWNIE: From the very beginning,  I thought of it as four parts — the four pieces to their career. The early days and then the liftoff, then this sort of middle time, then obviously the last act, the last episode, where the band comes back together again and the next thing you know, my brother is not well. I really saw that in my mind. There is so much in their story that the worst thing you could do would be to complicate it needlessly by moving things around. Don’t get in the way of this story. It’s a very powerful story. It has to do with friendship and brotherhood and the drive to do something that will last, create art that will last for generations — with these very independent and very strong-willed five high school friends.

TV WEEK: Dd you walk away with an understanding of just what it was that made them so indelibly Canadian?

MIKE DOWNIE: I think it’s about authenticity. I think it had a lot to do with telling Canadian stories. That has been done before, but they did it in a really anthemic way. They did it in a really big, “I want to sing along to this” way. We’re kind of an enigmatic country. We have had our challenges with our sense of identity and things like that. Certainly, 30 years ago we did — in the ’80s and ’90s. Like, “Here’s this great Canadian band that we all love, but wait a minute, what do the Americans think of them? Let’s check” . . . However, the Hip were telling Canadian stories and doing it in a very, very clever way that wasn’t nationalistic and wasn’t name-dropping or place-dropping for the sake of it, but weaving these observations and these stories into the consciousness of a generation.

You add to that just a fantastic band with a really interesting sound that cannot be put into a genre or even, I would argue, a time period — they’re kind of outside all that. When you put all of that together . . . I don’t think it represents Canada, I think it represents this feeling that we have and this idea of the Canadian experience.

TV WEEK: As a documentarian, is it a blessing and a curse to have such a close connection to your subject?

MIKE DOWNIE: I would say it felt like an advantage for me while I was doing it.  The only thing that we were conscious of in the very beginning was that, as a family member of the band, we needed to make sure that we were telling as open and honest a story as we possibly could. This has to be the full story, warts and all, of the band.

TV WEEK: Speaking not as a filmmaker, but a man who lost his brother, how did this project impact your personal grieving process, and your sense of Gord?

MIKE DOWNIE: I don’t have an easy answer. At first, I felt like doing all the research and really digging into all the material made Gord feel closer, but then at the same time it’s also exposing the void of his absence. Grieving is so complicated, and the closer you get to some kind of resolution, all of a sudden it slips through your fingers.

I can tell you that I really wanted this to be a fitting tribute to The Tragically Hip, and to my brother. I wanted it to cement their legacy in the hearts and minds of Canadians, and people all over the world. I feel like I’ve done that to the best of my ability. I feel really fortunate for the life of my brother. There was never a show — starting in Kingston at the Manor or at Alfie’s pub — that I didn’t elbow the stranger beside me as we were dancing or singing along to The Tragically Hip and say, “That’s my brother up there.”

I went into this feeling a lot of pride about my brother and the band, and I came out of it with even more. I now understand how hard he worked, I understand how hard he drove himself and how hard he drove other members of the band, and drove people crazy at times. I understand that he never took any of it for granted. I understand a lot of how he did what he did.

At the same time, he was my younger brother, and I just love him. I wish he was still here. I cried all the way through this. [But] it’s not painful. I’m just left with a lot of gratitude for having the opportunity to be pulled along for the ride.

The Tragically Hip: No Dress Rehearsal, streaming on Prime Video