How 'The Communist's Daughter' adapted a very unusual childhood into a hit digital series

The premise of The Communist's Daughter is simple enough. The McDougalds are a typical Canadian nuclear family living in suburban Toronto during the 1980s. Except for the fact the parents are avowed communists who met at a Friends of Cuba mixer; the kids are named Boris and Dunyasha, despite having no Russian heritage; they drive a Lada Niva 4x4; and they have what may or may not be a KGB spy living in the basement. Boris and Dunyasha's attempts to blend in at school and hide their Marxist upbringing get undermined when their dad tries to run for city council. 

But here's the kicker. The show — which is up for six Canadian Screen Awards, including Best Web Program or Series, Fiction and Best Direction, Web Program or Series for writer and director Leah Cameron — is (loosely) based on real life.

There was no spy in the basement, but Cameron's dad, who she describes as generally a "Bernie Sanders-type," went through what she calls "a Marxist phase at the height of the Reagan '80s." And while that phase coincided with her childhood, not her teenage years, many of the other details are accurate: they did really make family decisions by putting forward motions in a family council, they really did drive a Lada Niva, and her dad ran for office, repeatedly. ("My dad considered himself a communist, but he ran for the NDP," she says. "In real life, like he was practical enough to know he wouldn't win if he ran for the Communist Party. The only year he didn't run was the year Bob Rae got in.")

So, what was the elevator pitch for this show?

My pitch for it always was that it was a "fish out of water" comedy, loosely based on my childhood, about a girl from a Marxist family who's trying to fit in at the height of the consumerist '80s. And then her father runs for election in a highly public election campaign, which makes fitting in even more difficult.

We lived in a pretty conservative Toronto neighborhood, but we drove Soviet cars, and had lots of books about Chomsky and Che Guevara on the bookshelves and stuff like that. So I took that kernel of an idea and then decided to blow it up and exaggerated it into a family sitcom.

So in the show, pretty much all pop culture is alien to the kids. How true was that for you?

I would joke that I grew up behind the Iron Curtain of our household. We didn't have a television. My dad encouraged me to see a lot of alternative media, whether it was like, documentaries about Cuban boxers or, you know, we had subscriptions to Soviet Life magazine delivered to the door for a while. So that's true. And our family council meetings were true. I would always joke that they were supposed to be democratic, but then my dad would still veto a lot of the things we'd want, like if we put a motion on the floor to get on television. But in reality, I still went to see movies in the movie theater, like Gremlins and stuff like that. But my dad definitely would poo poo a lot of that stuff. So I saw American culture through a more skeptical lens with my peers.

I feel like in the last five or six years, we've seen a lot of shows about that late Cold War period: The Americans, Snowfall, Stranger Things, Deutschland '83. Those are all dramas, not comedies, but still, why do you think we want to revisit that era lately?

I think in the Trump era, which is hopefully over, but in the Trump era, a lot of the same themes from that time came to life again, but sort of through this funhouse mirror distortion. A lot of the ills we have in terms of the gap between rich and poor getting bigger, all those things sort of had their seeds in Reaganism. That's when trickle-down economics was thought of as a good idea, when union busting was thought of as a good idea. So I think that's why that era is interesting. It is to me anyway.

Did looking back at that era change how you thought about it at all?

It was just interesting to revisit that era and see what people sort of believed at the time, as well as just the fun of looking into the fashion trends at the time, which was really funny and hilarious. I guess personally, my dad passed away almost 10 years ago now. I want to say that I was inspired by the memory of my father, who is somebody who believed —maybe a bit naively — in sharing and in the equality of all human beings. He's not someone who supported a regime of any kind. He was a humanitarian. So it was just sort of interesting to look back on some of the values he tried to instill in my brother and I.

And also to see how things he used to talk about that kind of came true. Like, he'd always talk about the gap between rich and poor getting bigger and how useful unions were, and everyone thought he was kind of crazy. And now it's just so fascinating to me that that's really on a lot of people's minds. 

Anything else you want to add?

I guess one thing I would say is, if anyone thinks they're taking a risk by giving someone who's made a digital show an opportunity to work at TV, I'd say that they're not, because I'd say that making a digital show is harder than anything else you could possibly do. People who make digital know that. It's a space where people who are really dying to tell stories that are original have space to do it. I think that if we saw digital in Canada as a place for auteur-driven TV to be created, I think we'd be creating a lot of original TV here, instead of saying, "We want to make the next I May Destroy You," but we're just acquiring it instead. I think if the digital space could be used as an incubator for auteur-driven TV, we can end up with some really cool TV shows that start off as digital.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.