Burned out on dating, these Toronto actors turned their reproductive angst into a sitcom

The idea for her new comedy series, Nesting, came to Anna Hardwick while she and co-creator Rosa Laborde — both veteran actors and writers — were sitting at a friend's engagement party.

"We had just both gone through terrible relationships," she says. "We were wondering how and when we would ever find love, and if we'd had time to have a baby before our fertility ran out. And then we looked at each other and we made that promise that you make with your friends 'if it's still us on the shelf, let's just go for it. Let's [raise a baby] together.' Then we quickly realized that that's a really good idea for a show."

In Nesting, Hardwick and Laborde play characters also called Rosa and Anna. Deep in their 30s, single, and burned out on dating, the pair decide to stop trying to find husbands and start, instead, searching for donor dads to father children that they can raise together. Hilarity, and moments of deep emotional resonance, ensue. 

Laborde, who was also the showrunner, says that while they share names with the characters, they're not playing themselves.

"We kept our names so we could make fun of ourselves in a way," she says. "They're not us. They're meta-persons. They're offshoots. But we wanted the authenticity, the reality of the pain, the struggle… to be  underpinning [the show.]"

Hardwick says that, in addition to making a show that captured the panic and weirdness that comes from "feeling like your fertility window is closing," they also wanted to make a show that really paid tribute to their adopted hometown of Toronto. (Both she and Laborde are originally from Ottawa, but now consider Toronto home.)

"I hate it when Toronto pretends to be another city," she says. "We're a brilliant, amazing, diverse, beautiful — well, architecturally, maybe not the most beautiful city — but I love Toronto and I wanted to feature it. You know, Broad City Season 5 is so specifically in New York, like they're just digging into their neighborhoods in New York. That's what I wanted to do here with Nesting. We really wanted to relish in Toronto."

Laborde points to one character — a man they meet while accidentally looking for a potential father on an app meant for people seeking threesomes — as an example of a Toronto archetype.

"Our producer calls threesome guy Leaside Dad," she says, referring to the upscale midtown neighbourhood. "It kills me every time she says it. It's so specific."

"He's divorced and he's on the apps," says Hardwick, adding further explanation. "He's like, 'I'm going to just branch out here for a while.'"

While many comedies lean heavily on improvisation, Hardwick says that Nesting was extremely tightly scripted. 

"Alana [Harkin] is our director," she says. "She's hilarious and she has a sketch comedy background, and she was like 'I've never been on a set that has less improv.' But having worked on Rosa's words before, improv doesn't serve it. There's no point, because actually the writing is tighter and better."

Both Hardwick and Laborde say that Nesting was, fundamentally, a way of working through something that they were legitimately struggling with.

"Rosa and I are our close friends and we often laugh at our misery, like that's how we get through it," says Hardwick. "I think that's a very universal human trait. In the toughest times, I've often had the deepest belly laughs."

Watch Nesting on Crave, starting December 22.