TORONTO -- There's huge potential for an ego bruising for the actor playing the teenage protagonist in the charming and edgy comedy series "Less Than Kind," which is set in Winnipeg and debuts Monday on Citytv.

The lovable lead character, Sheldon Blecher, is described in promotional materials as a 15-year-old geek who is "really fat," wears size XXL clothing and has "body issues," while his older, narcissistic brother is called "good looking" and "muscular."

But Montreal actor Jesse Camacho, who plays Sheldon, is good-natured about it all.

"It is what it is. I mean, it's part of the character. I don't take as much offence to it. I've been through it," Camacho, 17, said in a recent interview beside Benjamin Arthur, who is hilarious in the pilot as the egotistical brother, Josh.

"It's like Benjamin -- they describe him as a good-looking guy, I mean, he has to deal with that every day too," Camacho joked while pointing to his co-star in a restaurant booth.

"It's a quality about yourself. It's definitely something I don't want to be living with the rest of my life. I want to get rid of it (the extra weight), I'm going to try to get rid of it, but it also just adds to the character, which is almost a shame, kind of," added Camacho.

Besides his weight and drama at school, Sheldon is also battling dysfunction at home, where his failed-actor brother bullies him, his mother (Wendel Meldrum) is a pyromaniac and his volatile, diabetic father (Maury Chaykin) struggles to run a driving school.

"I was bowled over by its frankness, directness, the heart that it had, the sensibility of it, the fact that it had a cutting edge to it but at the same time had a lot of heart," Chaykin, a Gemini-winning, Toronto-based actor, said of the smart, quirky script.

Chaykin said a lot of the show's comedy comes from raw emotion, not punchlines.

"It comes from pain of the heart, it comes from desire, it comes from wanting to do the right thing and not really being able to," said the acclaimed actor, who played an acerbic studio honcho on the HBO series "Entourage."

"The pain of that, of wanting to be a good father, of wanting to be a good mother, and not being able to or not knowing quite how to, but trying and not giving up. Being relentless. That's where the joy of the show lies and it is a joyful show, it has a lot of pain in it, a lot of laughs."

Sheldon isn't the only one that takes a battering in the series. The city of Winnipeg, where they filmed last year during what the cast called "an exceptionally cruel" winter, is also often derided by the characters.

And the show's theme song -- the Weakerthans' "One Great City" -- has the chorus "I hate Winnipeg."

The tune is actually "a misguided love song," said Marvin Kaye, who co-created and co-wrote the series with his Vancouver theatre-school pal Chris Sheasgreen of Richmond, B.C.

"Everybody in Winnipeg I think has this love-hate relationship with the city," said Kaye, who based the series on a one-act play about his own family, which really does run a driving school in Winnipeg (it's called Kaye's and it's "the oldest driving school in Winnipeg," said Sheasgreen).

"Everybody bitches about Winnipeg -- they bitch about the mosquitoes, they bitch about the winter -- but the song itself is actually this sort of really odd love ballad to the city and by saying they hate Winnipeg they're actually saying how much they love it."

Mark McKinney of "Kids and the Hall" is the story editor and show-runner for "Less Than Kind." He said filming in Winnipeg provided a strange sense of unity.

"I've got to recommend Winnipeg and Regina, these kinds of cities, as places to go shoot because nothing knits a cast and a crew together like freezing cold temperatures in a city where they're not natives," McKinney joked.

"It gives them one constant thing to complain about," added Kaye.

Chaykin recalls one particularly rough day, weather-wise.

"I went outside once and I almost died, literally died, because I didn't have a coat and I thought I could make it two blocks to an Indian restaurant and I almost didn't make it," he said.

"I've never been so happy to be inside an Indian restaurant in my life. As I stormed through the door, I think they thought I was holding up the place because I was literally running for my life towards this Indian restaurant, and then I took a cab home two blocks."