Victoria Gwendoline as Harley in Don't Even, which follows two best friends in late ‘90s Winnipeg as they grapple with their uncertain futures.Heather Beckstead/Crave
Portage Place Mall in downtown Winnipeg was hopping last summer. One series filming there, The Holiday Shift (tagline: “Come one, come mall”), had stuffed the place with Christmas trees and garland. Meanwhile, the new Indigenous-led Crave/APTN series Don’t Even, about two best friends in the summer of 1998, was shooting its second episode; it had repurposed four empty stores, and was frantic to keep Christmas out of its shots. Plus, the mall was open for regular customers – people kept trying to buy Don’t Even’s props.
But for Amber-Sekowan Daniels, Don’t Even’s showrunner and a band member of Garden Hill First Nation, the mall was more than a location: It was part of the personal history that permeates her series, which arrives Aug. 23. Growing up in 1990s Winnipeg, she would take swimming lessons at the adjacent YMCA, then head to the food court, where she’d find her uncle or grandma sipping coffee.
“Portage Place Mall is a significant meeting space for urban Indigenous folks,” Daniels said in a recent video interview, alongside series director Zoe Hopkins, who is Heiltsuk and Mohawk, and two of its actors, Jennifer Podemski and Gail Maurice, who are Anishinaabe and Cree/Métis, respectively. “We call it Portage Place First Nation.”
The series focuses on Violet (Leenah Robinson) and Harley (Victoria Gwendoline), fresh out of high school, spending one last summer in Winnipeg before moving to Toronto, and contending with the likes of cousin Cheryl, a budding entrepreneur who smashes dolls and resells them as haunted; wannabe wrestler Woody, a.k.a. the Wood Tick; and tricksteresque Mickey Carp.
Responsible Violet has always been an overachiever, a rule follower; her path is laid out for her, and it’s sure good on paper: sail through university, go to medical school, become a beacon for her community. Underestimated Harley distracts herself by making reckless decisions and creating chaos. But before September arrives, both will rethink who they are and what they want.
“It was important to me that they make mistakes, and some are pretty hard to watch,” says Daniels, a standup comedian who co-created the series Acting Good and wrote for Diggstown. “But when an overachiever starts finding her freedom, that’s an interesting story area.”
During our interview, the four women toss around the words hilarious, complicated, silly, delicious, cringey, vulnerable and refreshing to describe the tone. Daniels originally wrote it as a feature film, then retooled it to six half-hours. Her touchstones are 1990s coming-of-age classics, including the Claire Danes series My So-Called Life, and the films Empire Records and Can’t Hardly Wait. There are flecks of darkness: Harley’s parents are not around; Violet’s community is counting on her to redress long-standing discrimination in the medical system. But mostly, the series leans into its goofy charm.
“In the writers’ room, we’d take the conventions of coming of age, then ask, ‘What’s the Don’t Even version of that?’” Daniels says. “We’d start familiar, then get weird. Violet’s big crush, for example – we give him the dreamy, Jennifer Love Hewitt setup, the wind is blowing in his hair. Then he turns out to be not that guy, but in a way you don’t expect.”
Violet (Leenah Robinson) and Harley have to contend with the likes of cousin Cheryl, a budding entrepreneur who smashes dolls and resells them as haunted; wannabe wrestler Woody, a.k.a. the Wood Tick; and tricksteresque Mickey Carp.Heather Beckstead/Crave
Hopkins (Little Bird, Run the Burbs) began her career as an actor, “but there was nothing like these roles then,” she says. “You could play a bad girl or someone in feathers, that was it. But this is so rich. It brought me back to those free-range teenage days. It made me so happy for my young self.”
“I think I’ll be a lifelong student of comedy,” Hopkins continues. “What makes something funny 100 times? What makes you laugh one time and then never again? I don’t think anybody knows the magic ingredients. Some of the greatest comedians have made some of the worst comedy movies.”
“Comedy works best when it’s a team sport, and that’s what this was,” Daniels says. “I loved it when the actors said, ‘Can I try something?’ That’s exciting, and it felt very Indigenous to me: We’re all in the circle telling the story.”
Career veterans Podemski (Little Bird) and Maurice (Night Raiders), who play Violet’s ultrafrank mother and auntie, relished the chance to be funny for a change. “We need more laughing” in Indigenous-led projects, Podemski says. “We need to multidimensionalize the Indigenous experience. The last comedy I did was Moose TV, 20 years ago. If I could just do comedy for the rest of my life, I’d be so happy.”
“I came into myself when I turned 50,” she adds. “I started to care less about everything I cared so much about prior to that. So I really channelled myself: This is the me I want to be. I have teenagers, too, and I don’t sugarcoat things with them. I think they’re lucky to have a 50-year-old mom when all their friends have 35-year-old moms. I was able to bring that.”
Maurice channelled herself, too: “Anyone who knows me knows my humour is weird,” she says. “We all have a little weirdness. My grandma had the biggest potty mouth ever. So to get to be Badass Auntie, wow! I love that everyone will see how funny and beautiful our culture is.”
“Gail was so game to amp up something to make it wilder and funnier,” Hopkins jumps in. “I won’t spoil it for you, but for one scene I asked, ‘What if you stuck your entire head in the thing?’ And she did it, and it was hilarious.”
In addition to the mall, Daniels set one episode in a curling club – the fire alarm went off five times while they were shooting – and tried (unsuccessfully) to set one on a party boat. “Using your city can feel like a time capsule, and I wrote to the Winnipeg I remember,” she says. “But it hasn’t changed that much. It still has a small-town vibe, a vibrant art and activism scene. Indigenous people are everywhere. Many of the locations I grew up around look almost identical. We never make fun of the time period, we just use it as texture.”
If there are future seasons, she plans to set them in successive summers: “When you’re that age, a lot can change in a year. We want to play with that gap, explore those in-between phases, figure out where they are and how they’ve grown.”
“Sometimes you want to shake your younger self, but you have to learn those lessons,” Daniels sums up. “Growing up is awkward, especially when you think you’re already grown up. There’s a lot of comedy in that.”
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