‘Molly’ hits the road: New PBS miniseries takes viewers to five reservations

This story was originally published by ICT.

Curious, adventurous and boisterous, 10-year-old Molly of Denali gets around this season, taking her Grandpa Nat on trips to five different reservations to learn about their life and culture where they end up on everything from a hand-carved dugout canoe to a hot air balloon.

“Molly’s Epic Adventure” is coming to PBS KIDS on Nov. 3. Produced by GBH, the five-episode miniseries builds on the legacy of the Emmy- and Peabody Award-winning series “Molly of Denali,” which is the first nationally distributed children’s series in the U.S. to feature an Alaska Native lead character. In addition, the series’ creative producer is Yatibaey Evans, who is an Ahtna, Athabascan from Mentasta, Alaska. Dorothea Gillim is the show’s executive producer and co-creator.

Starting on an airplane, Molly begins using her phone to film her adventure, showing us the view from the window and her grandpa next to her as they lift off from her beloved Alaska. Each story introduces new characters and features a retelling of a traditional story from the respective Indigenous tribe.

‘Molly of Idaho / Cinder Cones and Broken Drones’
Traditional Homelands of the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes

While visiting the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes, Grandpa Nat leaves behind a microphone that he needs to do an interview for his documentary. Using lessons from the Indian Relay Race – and a maze of lava tubes – can Molly and Stormee get grandpa his mic?  After hearing the Shoshone-Bannock story about Doe’gwo’ah, the Big Snake responsible for creating the Craters of the Moon lava fields, Molly and her new friend Stormee encounter a real rattlesnake when retrieving Grandpa Nat’s wayward drone.

‘Newt in My Boot / Old Man of the Lake‘
Traditional Homelands of the Klamath Tribe

Molly finds a newt in her boot while exploring Wizard Island. Her friends from the Klamath Tribe teach her the importance of returning the newt to its natural habitat, but can Molly keep track of Cutie Newtie until she gets back to Crater Lake? Molly takes a rock from Crater Lake, but learns that it’s against Klamath traditions to do so after hearing an old, spooky tale about the “Old Man of the Lake.” Guilt-stricken, Molly tries to do right by returning the rock to its rightful place.

‘Feeling Sheepish/Chasing the Wind’
Traditional Homelands of the Diné Tribes

When Molly arrives in Shiprock, New Mexico, home of the Diné people, she’s excited to gift beaver mittens to her new friend, Kevin. But, when she is hit with the desert heat, she worries they may not be a good gift. Can she salvage this gift-giving snafu? Grandpa Nat’s new drone gets swept away by a dust devil when showing Molly an ancient Diné volcano in Shiprock. Determined to recover the lost drone, Molly and Grandpa Nat must use clues within the pictures it snapped before it crashed.

‘There is Pele’
Traditional Homelands of Native Hawaiian Peoples

When Grandpa Nat and Molly travel to Hawaii to learn about the volcano Mauna Loa, Molly makes a wish to see it erupt. But, when her wish comes true, she looks to the story of Princess Ruth Keʻelikōlani’s offering to help find a way to stop it.

How did they choose which tribes to visit for Molly and her grandpa? 

“We were doing some research around volcanoes and trying to think about where volcanoes are that folks don’t really know about,” Gillim, the executive producer and co-creator, told ICT. “We found five different areas and reached out to the tribes within those regions to see if they’d be willing to collaborate on a new Molly adventure and have Molly come visit their tribe and learn about who they are and a little bit about their culture.”

“We’re wanting a reason for Molly to travel to multiple locations across the US, and her grandpa is a volcanologist, so we thought that this would be a fun angle and a way to also tie together Indigenous knowledge and scientific knowledge and share with audiences the importance of both,” Gillim said. “The first thing Molly learns is that there was a volcano in New Jersey. Now it’s just a little hill left, so she doesn’t believe her grandpa. That’s just one example of what she learns. Each episode has a retelling of a traditional story.”

Creative Producer Yatibaey Evans told ICT: “Our whole production team and hopefully our audiences are just honored with the allowance of different tribes to share these very specific and traditional stories that haven’t been told to a large audience before and that they were willing to speak with us as television producers and share their creation stories for their volcanoes. Molly got to learn about each tribe’s memory and recollection for how their specific volcano was created. The one where she visits Shiprock, she learns about how there were Diné people in a very cool climate and they weren’t surviving and how the Thunderbird brought them to Shiprock or what’s known as Shiprock today, and they were able to survive and thrive in that region.”

Places like Shiprock are so scenic and vast. How did they translate that into illustration and then animation?

“We had advisors that were from the different tribal regions that worked with us,” Evans said, “and work closely with our writers as well as our animation team to give them specific images of their region. Our animators would do their best to replicate in a way that wasn’t exact but also a person from that region could recognize that this is our tribe’s landscape or way of weaving or pottery to develop that connection and be proud. It was a unique challenge to represent those creation stories in an artistic manner that was authentic and yet fully representative of the imagination of different tribes because these images haven’t been represented before.”

Oral stories passed down from generation to generation have never been illustrated or pictured. Evans says it was “a big challenge conversation. We have Indigenous animation animators who wanted to do justice for each individual tribe. There were a lot of conversations with not only the advisors but also elders that helped along with the episode to make sure that they felt comfortable with the representation that would be provided.”

Working with Molly for many years, she must seem very real to the producers and writers. Is she based on a real girl or on several real girls? 

“I don’t know if she’s necessarily based on one girl or several girls,” Gillim said. “She came from everyone who worked on Molly when we were developing her and doing the pilot. It was a true collaboration between GPH, and our Alaska Native Working Group and I feel like we all put our sort of love and different aspects of her personality and her family and her cultures into it, it was an amalgam of that. There’s a whole storyboard of who she is and her family tree. It is completely fictional, but she’s real to us. We know her personality, her quirks, what she likes to wear.”

“We feel that Molly is a part of all of us,” Evans said. “She’s our embodiment of our dreams, our visions, our hopes, what we would want to be in this world if our lives were on display and that’s really the village of Kaya and every character within the show. Everybody put their heart and soul into Molly, it’s been amazing being the creative producer and thinking about how would Molly sound? What would she say?  We want to make sure that she sounds Indigenous, right?  So you can’t just have anybody write her lines. We’ve had the same actress do her voice all these years, although Molly stays 10.” 

One of the things that the producers got to be a part of is designing a creative technology exhibit with Science World in Vancouver, Canada, for visitors to see behind the scenes and what it takes to go into production with the art, writing and technology that “Molly” exemplifies within the different episodes. 

They aim toward four- to eight-year-olds, “but I think we know Molly has kind of a broad appeal,” Evans said. “We know that there are older kids watching, we know parents are watching, we know grandparents are watching. Molly is 10, so a bit of an older sibling or figure for them. It’s what we call aspirational, that kids tend to like to watch older kids.”

So where does Molly go from here? Is there more to come? 

Evans says yes.

“There’s going to be an interactive game that comes out with the ‘Epic Adventure,’” Evans said. “Then we have another interactive game coming out later in 2026. We have another episode that will be premiering in 2026 as well. So more great stuff to come. We also have lesson plans. I just want to highlight that on PBS Learning Media teachers can access and incorporate the different learning components within ‘Molly’ for classes and homes. That’s always accessible. We have some new coloring sheets that we worked hard on. We have lots of resources on our website as well.”

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