Commercial Drive takes centre-stage in The Drive, a hyper-local video-on-demand (VOD) and web series that returns for its second season this month.
The Drive is the brainchild of decade-long Grandview residents Nick Hunnings and Lindsay Drummond. The theatre-artists-turned-web-series-progenitors created The Drive to “highlight the home we love and the people in it,” says Drummond in a recent phone interview.
The series follows a makeshift family of roommates, played by Hunnings, Drummond, Zach Martin, Jennifer Cheon, Kirsten Slenning, and Graem Beddoes. (Hunnings, Drummond, Slenning, and Kryssta Mills are all executive producers, while Beddoes and Hunnings are billed as the original creators of the show).
Characters wrestle with heartache and identity issues all over film and television (think This Is Us), but The Drive takes these dramatic beats and sets them loose in an iconic Vancouver neighborhood.
The Drive’s characters live, love, work and endure all manner of yearning, loss, and existential crises in a house on Charles Street. Commercial Drive and familiar haunts like Renzo’s Coffee, The Libra Room and Grandview Lanes provide backdrop and atmosphere and move story along.
“The Drive itself has a nurturing, compassionate way about it that I’ve always felt living here,” says Hunnings. The neighborhood “gives people room to grow, and having those locations accompany the characters along their journey really helps to do the same thing. It gives a great continuity, and it’s like their partner moving forward.”
This neighborhood feel extends to the series’ music, which is curated by Juno Award-winner Dan Mangan. For season two, Mangan (who popped up as a bartender in the first season) has pulled together a soundtrack that heavily features new and flourishing local talent, including David Vertesi of Hey Ocean!, The Zolas and Veda Hille. “Dan is really well tapped in to the local music community, and the music really helps to provide a texture and the tone of the show,” Hunnings says, noting that in season two, “the role the music plays is more present and fleshed out and it’s such a character on its own.”
The first season of The Drive won big at the 2017 Leo Awards, taking home hardware for Best Web Series and Best Actress in a Web Series for Cheon; it also netted a Best Director Award at Vancouver Web Fest for Stuart Gillies.
The Drive returns this month with seven all-new episodes. Season two will find the characters reeling from a paradigm-shifting loss. Chris’ (played by Martin) sobriety is threatened; Leo (Hunnings) strives to come to terms with unexpected parenthood; Aubrey (Lindsay) attempts to reintroduce herself to the local art scene; a grieving Gina (Cheon) threatens to sell the Charles Street house that made them a family in the first place.
New filming locations for this season included the Euro Café and, just beyond the Drive in Strathcona, the sprawling 1000 Parker Street warehouse that is a mainstay of the Eastside Culture Crawl (a crawl in which – mild spoiler alert! – Drummond’s artist character presents her work).
As with its first outing, episodes in the second season run between 10- and 13-minutes long – which means you can sit through the entire season without getting bleary-eyed. On Oct.15, Hunnings, Drummond, and co. will screen all seven episodes on the big screen at the Rio Theatre.
Viewers who haven’t yet binged the first season of The Drive won’t be lost: the screening will kick off with a short “Previously on The Drive” montage that should bring everyone up to speed. But anyone who wants to marathon the first season before the Rio screening is SOL, since those episodes are currently screening exclusively in Europe and Central America thanks to Paris-based distributor Canal+ (unless you have TELUS Optik, in which case you can watch the first season on VOD).
The Drive represents Hunnings and Drummond’s first foray into the world of film production and distribution, which is why they say they ignored the email inquiry from Canal+ when it first arrived. “We weren’t quite sure who they were,” laughs Hunnings. “And my friend who is a filmmaker is like, ‘You might want to get back to these guys.’ They’re actually the third largest distribution company in the world, we found out via Wikipedia.” Canal+ was looking for short-form content that was ideal for phone and tablet viewing, and discovered The Drive via a program that the series had entered at Cannes.
The Canal+ contract is up soon, so the first season will return to The Drive’s official web site in short order, says Drummond.
Both seasons of The Drive were made possible with grants from TELUS Optik Local Community Programming; following the Rio premiere, the second season will be available in its entirety for free on demand on TELUS Optik TV and on the series’ official web site at thedriveseries.com.
• The Drive screens at the Rio Theatre on Oct.15. Tickets at riotheatretickets.ca.
