Keep Breathing

Liv Rivera is a New York securities lawyer who has built her life around work and distance from other people. After learning that she is pregnant and finding old postcards from the mother who left her, Liv rushes north to meet her. A small plane carrying her crashes into a lake in the Canadian wilderness, and Liv becomes the only survivor. She must find food, shelter, water, and a way out while memories of her parents, her father’s death, and her love for Danny follow her. The show has a slow, tense, and sad tone, with survival scenes mixed with many flashbacks.

The main audience-visible identity element is Liv’s place as a Latina woman at the center of a survival story and as a successful lawyer and future mother. The show returns to her fear that she may repeat her mother’s behavior and hurt her own child. Liv’s struggle to survive is tied to accepting her past, choosing love, and deciding that she can become a different kind of parent. The series also gives a woman nearly every heroic action and keeps her inner life at the center, but it does not turn these ideas into speeches about politics or current social groups.