When “Harry Wild” returns for its fifth season on Acorn TV Monday night, Jane Seymour thinks her fans are going to experience the show’s best episodes yet.
“When we first started, it was a script I was given that I fell in love with. Obviously it’s a cozy murder — and how cozy is a murder? — but it was not ‘Murder, She Wrote.’ It was something different, something I’d never seen before,” she told TheWrap. “I’ve never seen an intellectual who ends up completely breaking all the rules, who ends up using her knowledge of history and literature, with her sidekick who is a kid from the wrong side of Dublin that refuses to go to school. The whole idea of this dynamic of those characters was fantastic.”
“Honestly, every season’s got better and better and better,” Seymour added. “That’s because we’ve got these great writers, Dave Logan, who created it, and then Jo Spain, who’s probably the top crime writer in Ireland and England. Americans don’t know that, but she’s published successfully some like 18 No. 1 books.”
“We thought, well, what can we do that really gives Harry a chance to have some sort of man in her life, which usually you don’t think of doing with a woman of a certain age. So we like to break all the barriers,” she continued. “And we knew that everyone gets excited when Joe Lando and I join up. We can’t seem to bring back ‘Dr. Quinn,’ I don’t know quite why. But we did a Hallmark thing and ‘A Christmas Spark’ with Lifetime, all hugely successful. Joe and I work really well together.”
Indeed, the 75-year-old actress’ “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman” co-star Joe Lando joins the show for Season 5, alongside fellow series regulars Rohan Nedd, Kevin Ryan, Aoife Mulholland and Paul Tylak. But how does working on a streamer like Acorn TV in 2026 compare to her early days on movie sets?
“When I first started, I was in England in big, big, big, big movies like ‘James Bond’ and things like that. It would take hours and hours between set-ups. You would so be bored and want to fall asleep two hours before they got round to doing the next angle on the same scene; it was really hard to just keep up the energy,” Seymour recalled. “Some people may hate the digital world, but I love it. We work faster, you can really keep the emotion going, you have the energy you need for the scenes. You know immediately whether you’ve got it or not, you don’t wait ’til you know a week later when the rushes come back… I can’t even believe that we had those days. Plus, I remember going to the cutting room floor and seeing bits of my performance on the ground, and I pick them up and go, ‘Don’t we need this?’”
“I was loosely called the Queen of the Miniseries there for a while. We did what’s called long-form drama, which was unheard of, and in those days with no streaming, it was event television. I mean, literally everyone stopped and watched it. I think one thing I did got 50-plus million shares. Whatever it was, huge. Everyone would watch,” she further explained. “Now with the streamers, I think it’s fantastic, because I personally don’t care for making movies where every 10 minutes you’ve got to end on this note because we’re going to sell soap or whatever, and then we’re back. You know, the drama or the storyline has to be written in such a way to let everyone go off and watch the commercial and then get their attention back to the story. I’m just so glad we don’t have to do that, because I love to binge-watch really good shows.”
Ultimately, Seymour has faith that fans both new and old are going to like what they see: “They are going to love this more than ever. They really are. I think it’s the best season we’ve ever had. Sometimes when you do a show, you start up high, second one’s pretty good, and then it’s not. Not with ‘Harry Wild.’ If you’ve never watched ‘Harry Wild’ but you love ‘Dr. Quinn,’ I think you would love this.”
“Harry Wild” Season 5 premieres Monday on Acorn TV.
