'Nesting': New comedy series reflects frustrations of dating, fertility and housing

With the pressure women face to get married, buy a house and have children, Anna Hardwick and Rosa Laborde's comedy series Nesting (on Crave) is about two friends who decide to take matters into their own hands.

In Nesting, Anna and Rosa (yes, the writers who star in the series used their real names) have a plan. They're going to get pregnant at the same time and raise their children together in the same home, for their own unconventional family unit.

In each eight-minute episode, Anna and Rose are looking for a man to fertilize their eggs, to put this plan into action.

"It came out of an actual conversation where we said, 'Maybe we should do that,' one day, as people, as friends," Laborde told Yahoo Canada. "Almost instantaneously we're like, that's a show."

"It came out of a desire for something and it not having worked out yet, not having found what we were looking for in terms of partnership, housing, child. Then we had this rapport and it had stayed with me after a breakup, and it was a harmonious, domestic situation. It kind of went, 'Why is this not an option in the playbook of how to do life? And can it be?' And now it turns out that it really can and lots of people are trying it and doing it, and it's a beautiful way to create family. It doesn't need to be how you think it's supposed to look."

Even the part where Anna and Rosa are sort of auditioning prospective men stems from real experiences.

"I must have gone on 500 dates online and during that period of my life, ... you would meet some pretty interesting characters, every single one of those characters, every episode is based on some either direct reality or slightly altered story from personal life," Hardwick shared.

Watch Nesting on Crave

Directing the eight-episode series is Allana Harkin, an Emmy-winning producer, director and writer for her work on Full Frontal with Samantha Bee.

Something that was particularly interesting for Harkin about the story of Nesting is that it very much crafted with a "female gaze."

"Everybody thinks that we hear from this perspective all the time now, but that's actually not true," she stressed. "That was what I was really excited about."

"The other side of it was, I felt that this was such a universal thing, of people dating online, trying to find love in this age. ... The other big part of it was, I love the female friendship side of everything. ... Women are excellent at friendship and so it was just really beautiful when I first read the scripts and I was like, 'I can't believe I haven't seen this particular story.' Honestly, it was my first reaction. I haven't seen this told before, like this, and in such a succinct, tight way."

In terms of having that female perspective for Nesting, Laborde highlighted that they wanted to "authentically" relay their experience, but in a "playful" way.

"We would come together and talk about our experiences, just as friends, being out in the world. Love, romance, thinking of having children, and even when it was hard we would laugh, because we were always making fun of it," Laborde said. "We were always able to make fun, in the moment, of the most painful, sometimes challenging situations."

"So this creation came out of that. How do you find the joy in our perspective? ... We just leaned entirely into our perspective, outside of a structure, even outside of a long form television structure."

Deciding on the 'Nesting' Season 1 cliffhanger

Without spoiling too much of the story, as we approach the end of the season, Anna and Rosa do find someone who can be part of their plan, including the pregnancy portion, but it's messy, particularly as it relates to Salvatore Antonio's character Nico. Their dynamic reveals that maybe Anna and Rosa didn't think absolutely everything through.

"Anna and Rosa have this intention, and it's a beautiful intention, but it's not thought all the way through," Laborde explained. "What Nico does with his reaction to them is shedding a light on that."

"He is the character that goes, 'No, you can't. This is weird. You're going to get pregnant at the same time?'"

In the final moments of Nesting, a cliffhanger leaves us with questions about Anna and Rosa's relationship, and if it really is just platonic friendship.

Watch Nesting on Crave

In terms of that part of the story, Laborde said that question in the series "always felt inevitable."

"It felt like an extension of their love for each other and a restructuring of what romantic love is, and that some of the best romances are born of true friendship," she said.

"Anna is always looking for the shiny thing out there and blind to what's right in front of her," Hardwick added. "Rosa's story arc is also to grow up a little bit, and meet Anna and some of the practicalities of life, and so for the two of them to meet on a different plane is inevitable."

Harkin explained that from a directing standpoint, her philosophy is to shoot each option for the scene, and that was the case for the final cliffhanger moment.

"But then when we saw it we thought, oh that's really interesting because it does give you a, 'I want to see what happens in Season Two,' or 'I want to see what happens in the next episode,'" she said.

"The way we did it was just, let's do it all in one shot, one camera angle, one beat. ... I think that was a smart move, just keeping it really clean, really simple, leaving us a little bit of a something at the end so everybody wants to find out what happens to these two."

Pushing back on the idea that a woman will be saved by her Prince Charming

What's particularly impressive about Nesting is how much great comedy and thoughtful storylines can be crafted and executed in just eight-minute episodes.

"I worked at [Full Frontal with Samantha Bee] and as a director there, I had to turn things around so quickly, and in such a tight timeline," Harkin said. "If you ever looked at what we had to accomplish in 45 minutes, it would make someone's head blow up."

"So actually, with this show, and everyone was so worried that we only had eight days for eight episodes. I'm like, 'This is palatial.'"

But Harkin did admit that it wasn't always so easy for Nesting, particularly one day in May when there was a fluke heatwave in Toronto and they were shooting the show in an attic.

Mixed in with all the outrageous comedy and the fun, Nesting also manages to shine a light on some very real societal issues, like financial literacy that most people are never actually taught to understand.

"My aunt was a single mother and she took me aside when I was 25 and she said, 'Here's how you need to be financially responsible. Here's how you have to save,'" Hardwick shared. "I got myself a book, I got myself a financial planner, but that doesn't happen for young women."

"We're sort of set out into the world like, 'Oh, well, you're going to find your Prince Charming and then you're going to be fine financially.' That's absolutely not true. You have to do it yourself and the heteronormative idea that you're going to be saved by someone else, I think that's what the story is also talking about."

'Who's going to get pregnant?'

Speaking about a possible future for Nesting, Laborde and Hardwick do have ideas for where they want the story to go.

"We want to see them get pregnant, but we don't know who will get pregnant," Laborde said. "Who's going to get pregnant? How quickly? Will it happen for the other person? Will there be fertility struggles? How will they continue to manage these greater relationships that they've created?"

"All of that is the fodder of now they're in the real grittiness, the real muck of building a family and all the ways that you figure out how to negotiate your relationships."