Winnipeg plays itself
Manitoba's capital has a starring role in two new sitcoms
Last Updated: Monday, November 17, 2008 | 3:11 PM CT
By Alison Gillmor, CBC News
The Winnipeg-based comedy series Less Than Kind stars (left to right) Maury Chaykin, Wendel Meldrum, Benjamin Arthur, Jesse Camacho and Nancy Sorel. (Citytv) In film and on television, the city of Winnipeg usually stands in for some place else. A favourite of production crews looking for guaranteed snow between November and March, the city often pinch-hits for the American Midwest — like quietly prosperous Kansas in Capote or sleepy, slow-growth Kansas in The Lookout.
Less Than Kind and House Party suggest that Winnipeg is ready for its close-up — but it’s not exactly a glamour shot.
The outside world occasionally recognizes Winnipeg as Winnipeg, but this can be a double-edged distinction. Michael Scott (Steve Carell), an inept manager at a Scranton, Penn., paper company on the NBC sitcom The Office, was recently sent to the Peg on a weekend business trip, a move that stamped the town as the Scranton of the north. To add injury to insult, the episode was filmed entirely in L.A.; attempting to supply some local flavour, the Destination Winnipeg tourism agency shipped down bags of Old Dutch potato chips.
Winnipeg finally gets to play itself in the new City TV comedy drama Less Than Kind, which was shot last winter in minus-30 temperatures, as well as in House Party, which premiered last week on the Comedy Network (where it is available for download). The sharp-edged Less Than Kind centres on a wildly dysfunctional Jewish family that runs a failing driving school, while House Party is a raunchy, six-episode series that covers a one-night house party from five different perspectives. (Think Rashomon with porn-themed drinking games.)
These shows suggest that Winnipeg is ready for its close-up, but it’s not exactly a glamour shot. The two series position Winnipeg as a town out of time, sort of the basement rec room of the national consciousness. The Blecher family on Less Than Kind lives in a house that seems to have been decorated with a brief surge of optimism in 1972 — a riot of shiny wallpaper and avocado accent walls — and then left virtually untouched. Marvin Kaye, who created the series with Chris Sheasgreen, drew on his childhood memories of ‘70s-era Winnipeg and transposed the story to 2008, with remarkably few changes.
At first look, House Party is more obviously contemporary. The cheerfully filthy dialogue is aimed at a young demographic, as is the anarchic premise. Nice, nervous Adam (Michal Grajewski), taking advantage of his parents’ weekend getaway in Fargo, N.D., plans an intimate affair that turns into a big, out-of-control bash. Adam’s vain attempts to keep coasters under drinks and feet off coffee tables are intercut with flash-forwards that suggest catastrophic levels of property damage.
Young Winnipeggers find ways to stay warm in the raunchy six-part series House Party. (The Comedy Network/CTV) The story may skew toward 21st-century teen comedy, but the production design is strictly old school. Again, we have a classic suburban split-level awash in mid-century-modern teak shelving, Harvest Gold kitchen appliances and adorably old-fashioned technology. An ancient top-loading VCR foils the partygoers’ attempts to watch porn DVDs, while the family’s outmoded turntable and polka-friendly record collection hamper the evening’s music mix. (“Who doesn’t love Let’s Clarinet?” jokes one of Adam’s friends.)
This sense of Winnipeg as comically out of date is partly the result of the city’s creative diaspora. The Peg breeds smart, funny people — those long, harsh winters hone humour as a coping mechanism — and then sends them out into the wider world. For these exiles, Winnipeg becomes frozen in time, along with memories of awkward adolescent kisses, wood-panelled rec rooms and frigid bus stops. These hard-wired emotional associations persist — despite evidence that many present-day Winnipeggers own SUVs, Italian couches and flat-screen TVs.
It’s easy to see how the pull of nostalgia works on Winnipeg ex-pats. Less Than Kind’s Marvin Kaye moved away as a young man, attending McGill University and later studying drama at Vancouver’s Studio 58. But even those stalwarts who stay put, like House Party creators Sarah Constible and Matt Kippen, seem captivated by Winnipeg’s retro vibe.
House Party’s opening credits unfold on cheesy old album covers. This simple visual device encapsulates the salvage mentality that animates not only Winnipeg’s legendary garage sales, but also much if its art. Many Winnipeg artists seem to have a Value Village aesthetic, finding meaning and beauty in the old, the discarded and the undervalued. Cult filmmaker Guy Maddin pines for archaic movie styles and for a Winnipeg that has ceased to exist (and perhaps never did); multimedia artist Daniel Barrow is inspired by lost 1980s public-access television shows; while the film collective L’Atelier National du Manitoba takes a neo-ironic look at a town haunted by the ghost of a dead NHL hockey team.
Winnipeg breeds smart, funny people, and then sends them out into the wider world. For these comic exiles, the city becomes frozen in time.
Less Than Kind, which has already been picked up for a second season, works because it integrates Winnipeg’s crowded past with a fierce, funny and generous look at a timeless situation. Fifteen-year-old Sheldon Blecher (played by the tremendously appealing Jesse Camacho) is an old soul in Husky Boy jeans; he’s the only grownup in a completely loopy family. Father Sam (played by Maury Chaykin, once again proving he’s Canada’s best character actor) is perpetually furious, constantly scheming. Warm, well-meaning mother Anne (Wendel Meldrum) handles her stress with a touch of pyromania. (When Sheldon wants to calm her down, he turns up the hypnotic blue flames on the gas stove.) Sheldon’s older brother Josh (Benjamin Arthur) is a narcissistic ninny who briefly escaped Winnipeg, a town he despises, when he got a beefcake role in a TV series called Thunder Bay O.P.P. Josh is back home now, and his habit of wearing a thin, hip leather jacket in the teeth of a Winnipeg winter is his way of pretending the arrangement is temporary. When Sheldon wants to torment his brother, he intones, “You were born here and you’re going to die here.”
With lines like this, it would be easy to view the series as anti-Winnipeg. It’s not. Like its opening theme song — the Weakerthans’ One Great City, with its plaintive “I hate Winnipeg” refrain — the show takes complaints and carping and turns them into anguished love. The production is unsparing in its depiction of Winnipeg’s winter weather — most scenes open with glacial establishing shots — but there is also real affection for a place where memories linger and connections run deep. The plot twists on Less Than Kind rely on coincidences that are perfectly believable to Winnipeggers, who constantly see evidence of the one-degree-of-separation rule. For example, Sheldon’s gawky gal-pal turns out to be the daughter of the Revenue Canada accountant who’s auditing his dad. The show’s attitude is typically Winnipeggy: sometimes self-deprecating, sometimes chippy, always funny. (Here’s how Sam talks up his hometown: “Winnipeg has great parking. You can park anywhere.”)
House Party also develops a sure sense of place, setting a tone of prairie fatalism when the first party guest slips on an icy sidewalk and crushes his two-four of Moosehead beer. The show’s obvious subject is twentysomething confusion, but underneath this specific theme runs the feeling that there’s nothing like a Manitoba house party, where the contrast between the warm, bright inside and the cold, dark outside is almost primal.
Neither Less Than Kind nor House Party make extravagant claims for their city — kind of the opposite, really — but they do make it clear that it’s not the Scranton of the north. When Winnipeg finally gets to represent itself, it turns out to be prickly, eccentric and ruefully proud.
Less Than Kind airs on City TV. House Party airs on the Comedy Network.
Alison Gillmor is a writer based in — you guessed it — Winnipeg.
