Sheldon Blecher is fat. Josh is a narcissist. Their father is abrasive and their mother is a pyromaniac.
Marvin Kaye (with video)
And Marvin Kaye can relate.
Kaye is the co-creator of Less Than Kind, a Canadian television show based loosely on his life growing up in Winnipeg with his Jewish family.
The sitcom, which features the Blechers and their family-run driving school, premiered its second season on HBO Canada on Feb. 19 and is currently in development for its third.
Although the show originally premiered on Citytv’s in 2008, the concept was born in the mid 1990s as a one-act play, called They Have Mayonnaise in Montreal.
“The play was produced and had a pretty good run,” Kaye said. “It just sort of sat on the shelf. Years later, I hit my mid 30s and me and my friend Chris [Sheasgreen, the show’s co-creator] decided we needed to figure out what we’d do with our lives, besides be starving actors, which was becoming a little boring.”
After pitching the show to various networks, Kaye and Sheasgreen ended up working with the production company Breakthrough Films and Television.
So far, the show has won two Canadian Comedy Awards and was nominated for nine Gemini Awards.
For Kaye, the key to a successful show is creating relatable characters.
“To give these characters heart, you have to give them a little bit of your humanity,” he said. “Those characters were based on my life and growing up in Winnipeg and those family relationships.”
Kaye, whose real life family owned a driving school, sees himself as Sheldon, played by Jesse Camacho, who’s a smart, awkward overweight teenager that’s constantly being made fun of by his handsome, self-absorbed brother Josh, played by Benjamin Arthur.
“I based it on my perspective,” he said. “They’re all these crazy family members and they have a tough time relating to each other, but the fact that their family is so strong…you forgive a lot of those foibles and mistakes.”
The show’s tone can be summarized by its theme song – One Great City by the Weakerthans. The theme song’s last line is “I hate Winnipeg.”
“It talks about the city in a fond way. It had a back-handed compliment. We kept coming back to [the song]. It seemed right. It had the same tone in it, it had a sentimentality to it, but it was kind of harsh.”
The show may be a comedy, but the second season will get much darker than the first, Kaye said.
While Less Than Kind explores failed acting careers and dating disasters, it also delves into issues of mortality as Sheldon’s father, Sam Blecher, played by Maury Chaykin, faces a near-death experience. Well, several near-death experiences, as he dies and comes back to life three times in the season premiere.
For Kaye, the show is about balancing the line between tragedy and comedy.
“I think life does that too. That was sort of our intention. The sweet spot was to get someone laughing and crying within several minutes of each other. If you can do that, that’s a special spot to be in,” he said.
While the show is based on Kaye’s life, most plot lines aren’t.
“The story eventually gets a life of its own. We have to wave reality goodbye,” he said. “There’s things that happened in the show that have never happened in my life, but we try to keep it rooted in a real human place.”
Kaye, who has toured with the theatre company Shakespeare in the Rough and appeared in films like The Perfect Man and Undercover Brother, also worked on the production side of television in shows like Puppets Who Kill and Little Mosque on the Prairie.
