From Portage Place to Garbage Hill

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This article was published 22/08/2024 (760 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

‘I don’t know where I live right now,” jokes Amber-Sekowan Daniels, who has chosen the nomadic career path of a comedy writer in the world of Canadian television comedy.

“I’m everywhere.”

In 2022, she spent time in the fictional fly-in reserve of Grouse Lake First Nation, the central locale of Acting Good, a sitcom she co-created with comedian-star Paul Rabliauskas, now in its third season.

Before that, Daniels, a band member of Garden Hill First Nation, found herself in the writers’ room for the critically acclaimed but short-lived CBC adaptation of Eden Robinson’s Trickster series, set in the British Columbia community of Kitimaat.

But for her latest series, Daniels packed up her creative U-Haul and drove back to Winnipeg, the city where she was born and raised and where nobody asks her where in the world corresponds with the 204 area code.

Much more than a return to her geographical roots, Don’t Even — a whip-smart, denim-clad, coming-of-age story about hanging out in parking-lot waystations and downtown malls — is a fictionalized retrospective of teenage life, with all the specificity, heart and winking self-effacement we’ve come to expect from Prairie comedy productions.

In the opening scene, time-stamped June 1998, a nervous valedictorian named Violet Zhigaag (Leenah Robinson) rehearses her speech for her best friend Harley Schumack (Winnipeg’s Victoria Gwendoline) on the peak of Garbage Hill.

The second episode takes place entirely inside Portage Place Mall, where Violet scrimps for a designer jacket, her brother Wesley (Joel Oulette) dons a security badge, and her uncle, whom they call The Fox (Juno-nominated local composer and musician Jason Burnstick) holds court in, well, the food court.

The characters call it the band office.

Aside from creating fictional stores, the mall didn’t get any cosmetic updates — “People would come in and think they were operational,” she says — effectively becoming a metaphor for Don’t Even as one time capsule cradled within another, a Manitoban stacking doll that reveals a vision of adolescence as seen by a thoroughly modern elder millennial eager to exceed her own expectations.

At Churchill High School, Daniels was a devoted nerd and an errant wild child in the pit at Propagandhi gigs, listening to Liz Phair sing about going west before listening to Dinosaur Jr. — an art kid in waiting.

“This will sound so grimy, but we were hanging out in a lot of parking lots,” recalls Daniels, who grew up in Wolseley, writing songs for her punk band called the Drama Queens with her cousin Missy Daniels. Outside of band practice, plans were unpredictable.

“Your plans were to walk around. You were always looking for something to do and not realizing that was the experience of growing up. It was a lot of roaming around, waiting for stuff to happen, having the summer of your life and not even knowing it.”

Unlike Violet Zhigaag, whose last name means skunk, Daniels wasn’t a med-school-seeking valedictorian. But when she graduated, she left home to follow her dream in the then-burgeoning B.C. film industry. At the University of British Columbia, she studied writing and then completed a technical production program at the B.C. Institute of Technology.

For over a decade, Daniels worked in unscripted TV and battled writing-program rejection while building a career as a standup comedian in Winnipeg, before being invited to the writers’ table for the final season of the CBC procedural Diggstown, which led to her position as a junior writer on Trickster.

“As a writer, you get hired on a show and the job is to write in the voice of that show,” recalls Daniels, who moved to Toronto in 2014 where she still ostensibly resides. “I can’t come into a space as a writer and give them my personality over and over and over again.

“It was about figuring out how to be a bit of a chameleon, finding the tone of the show and what the showrunner is trying to do to execute that.”

With Don’t Even, Daniels wasn’t the lizard, but the branch. The writer wanted to create a narrative starring Indigenous girls, originally conceiving of the show as a feature-length film akin to Superbad or Empire Records.

She showed an early script to Pier 21 Films, who saw merit in the rough draft.

“It’s a comedy that has a lot of vulnerability and weirdness in it. Winnipeg is a place that houses all of that.”–Amber-Sekowan Daniels

Meanwhile, Daniels soaked up all she could in the writers’ rooms, while also learning from former Winnipegger Ellen Vanstone, a journalist and writer who wrote for Ken Finkleman’s existential comedy Good God and for the long-running police procedural Rookie Blue, as well as Diggstown.

“She took time out of her day to show me how to write a script. She was my film school,” says Daniels.

Pier 21 suggested structuring that early script as a TV series and Daniels leapt at the opportunity, surrounding herself with comedy writers who could relate to the narrative she was trying to craft. She also got to write several songs for the show’s soundtrack.

It was an environment that reminded Daniels of her teenage years, when she and her best friend made short films with rented equipment at the Video Pool Media Arts Centre, where they enrolled in a fundamental video production course.

“They were kind of nonsense, tableau-style, with weird shots and weird jokes. One was a mockumentary about two girls asking a guy to prom. It screened at IMAX (in Portage Place). We were two young people having fun, not worried whether what we were making was any good,” she says.

“Good stuff comes out of you when you’re doing it for the purity.”

Daniels knows Don’t Even is not for everyone.

“But I think if my weird little self found it, it would mean a lot to me. It’s a comedy that has a lot of vulnerability and weirdness in it. Winnipeg is a place that houses all of that.”

Now in Vancouver writing for an upcoming CBC comedy series inspired by the hip-hop group Snotty Nose Rez Kids, the ever-mobile Daniels still keeps her hometown tucked in her pocket.

“I haven’t gotten rid of my Manitoba number. It’s the cheapest plan in the country.”

Don’t Even is streaming on Crave and will air on APTN.

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com