Chicken Wings & Sauce to Go Around: Less Than Kind

IT'S  A PUB in Toronto's Annex neighbourhood on a weekday night, and the table's swapping stories of the 2nd, newly charmed season of LESS THAN KIND.  (2nd Season premieres tonight, 8:30 p.m., HBO Canada, also available on Demand.  And you can watch the 1st show online here.)

It's me, Showrunner Mark McKinney, and Creators Marvin Kaye & Chris Sheasgreen.  

I have a lot of time for LTK, and not just because it's funny, well made, and now comes with a Cinderella-rebirth story attached.

And it's not cause I beat my friend Marvin's ass at the poker table on Superbowl Sunday. Seriously. Like a redheaded stepchild. He left before the game was over a broken, chastened man. (Full disclosure: when the show was first in development, I did a brief round of story editing on it. This was before McKinney's involvment)

Nope.  LESS THAN KIND is, at almost every level, a shining example of what can happen when everything goes right in the Canadian system.  Which is to say, as McKinney puts it, "We got lucky. Crazy lucky."

Let's stack up that luck looking backward.  LTK2 was supposed to be an orphaned show. The original broadcaster, Rogers-owned CityTv -- canceled the show before the 2nd season even aired.

"The people at City were great," says Kaye. "They ordered the show, they liked it, they were really supportive of it and let us make the show we wanted to make, and they picked up a second season even before the first went to air."

But when the show did go to air, the problems started.  Sandwiched after seasons-old reruns of Curb Your Enthusiasm, and plagued by City's chronic bad promotion of homegrown fare, it floundered in a Monday night timeslot, and was subject to technical gaffes galore.  Shows aired in the wrong aspect ratio, out of order, with the music & effects track mixed higher than the vocals -- and then the show went away suddenly when City needed to simulcast The Bachelor for an extra half hour. It was a Canadian TV horrorshow tale.

Those few people who saw the show in its first season saw something that was, in many ways, the anti-Corner Gas.  Centred around the Winnipeg Blecher family, the show chronicles the coming of age of teenage son Sheldon.  Sheldon's sensitive, overweight, and adamantly refuses to learn how to drive.  (His father owns a Driving School.)  Sheldon desperately wants out of his crazy family, which includes a pyromaniac mother, his overbearing father, and newly-bounced back older brother -- a washed up actor who's still trading off minor fame from his seminal role in Thunder Bay, O.P.P.

You don't often see families like the Blechers on Canadian TV.  They're as dysfunctional as Roseanne Connor's brood -- and the eps have just about the same mix of the outrageous & the heartfelt as the best of the high-water mark of Roseanne's career.  The mordant wit of LTK, and its loopy, confident Canadianness is signalled straight from the start, with the theme song -- The Weakerthans' "One Great City," (whose chorus builds to the immortal refrain, 'I Hate Winnipeg.')

So if nobody saw it, how could it be called lucky?  Well, take your pick.  Maury Chaykin as the father.  Newcomer Jesse Camacho as the son.  Wendel Meldrum, an actor who's actually believable -- and heartbreaking -- as Sam Blecher's wife. "We found her through L.A.," says McKinney, who tapped the casting director he'd worked with as part of his season long stint on Aaron Sorkin's Studio 60.  But they also found local Winnipeg actors -- some of them with very little experience (including the standout Brooke Palsson as Miriam) who turned in hilarious, gifted, piquant and vibrant performances.

But on this night over Chicken Wings, the luck they're talking about is the move to HBO Canada.  As McKinney relates the story, they had shot the entire 2nd season, and were busy posting when the notes started to come in from City. They were odd notes.  They seemed to strike at the heart of the comedy, watering it down.  Eventually, the truth came out. Over the course of the year, Rogers strategy toward Citytv changed. They wanted to go for a more family friendly audience -- but LTK was a harder edged, unsentimental show.

What happened next wasn't supposed to happen.  Thanks to a friendly exec at HBO Canada, (who'd been involved with the show initially at Rogers) a deal was struck between the cable net and City to take over the show. The cut scenes were restored, leading to tonight's premiere.  Even McKinney admits that the show was always really a cable show at heart. And now it's come home.

Point is, that kind of wheely-dealing rarely happens in Canada.

The luck doesn't stop there. In fact, the funny thing about the luck of LTK, is that so much of it is actually not luck at all -- it's simply the best case scenario of the way things are supposed to work -- but rarely do.

The show was based on an autobiographical play by co-creator Kaye.  Kaye and Sheasgreen went through the National Screen Institute's training program with the property.  They found a network exec who was passionate about the show. They hooked up with a production company, Breakthrough, whose development and producer staff let the show be what it wanted to be.  They brought on Mark McKinney, who brought his perfectionism and two decades of comedy experience to running the creative.  McKinney & the creators worked together well, with mutual respect both for the material & each other.

In fact, another way you can see the "luck" of Less Than Kind at work is with the free and generous praise McKinney, Kaye and Sheasgreen pile on everyone involved.  Maury was fantastic...the production designer created a flooded basement that worked miracles this season...the writing room was stacked with greats like Garry Campbell and toward the end of the season, when they suddenly had to rewrite some scripts, Rob Sheridan.  "Rob saved our ass" says McKinney.  From the music, to the crew, to Directors like Kelly Makin, there's plenty of credit to go around.

McKinney marvels at a 2nd season scene of Sheldon's first kiss -- that had the whole crew practically in tears.  The show might have had to shoot in -50 Winnipeg winter weather, but in many other ways, it seems like a charmed production.

"We were also men alone," says McKinney, explaining the degree to which scripts were worked and reworked.  Long separation from families (All three have children, & Sheasgreen & Kaye's wives both had babies during the shoot) may have made for long nights, but it certainly meant that settling for "good enough", wasn't.

It shows.

The 2nd season opens with Sam in the hospital, close to death, picking up where Season 1 left off.  It features a very funny guest shot by McKinney's fellow Kid in the Hall, Dave Foley.

Less Than Kind's charmed rebirth on HBO Canada may have a few more chapters to it, still. The show's about to get some recognition (more I can't really say because of an embargo; I'll correct this sentence to be less cryptic next week.)  and they're currently breaking stories for a possible third season. Though it hasn't been greenlit yet, all three are optimistic.

And after the ride this show's had, they probably have every reason to be.  Interestingly enough for students of the comedy form, too, this year the LTK writers room is a real anomaly in scripted comedy -- there's a majority of women -- including writer/director Adriana Maggs (fresh from screening Grown Up Movie Star at Sundance,)  Morwyn Brebner (the upcoming Copper), Jenn Engels (who returns from season 1) and story coordinator Kim Coghill.  That's a lot of estrogen, and a chance to bring new energy & focus to the lives of the bold Blechers.


Less Than Kind airs Fridays on HBO Canada.


An earlier version of this story contained an error.  Bruce McDonald directed episodes of LTK. Incorrect info appeared earlier.