King of Kensington
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King of Kensington was a Canadian television sitcom which aired on CBC Television from 1975 to 1980. It was the first genuinely successful and popular Canadian sitcom.
The show starred Al Waxman as Larry King, a convenience store owner in Toronto, Ontario's Kensington Market who was known for helping friends and neighbours solve problems. His multicultural group of friends consisted of Nestor Best (Ardon Bess), Max (John J. Dee), and Tony "Duke" Zarro (Bob Vinci), who hung around regularly to the perennial disapproval of King's mother Gladys (Helene Winston).
For the first three seasons, Fiona Reid played his wife Cathy. At the end of the third season, Reid decided to leave the series, so Larry and Cathy divorced. The show never fully recovered its stride or chemistry as Larry pursued other relationships, most notably with Gwen Twining (Jayne Eastwood) in the final season.
The show's gentle but politically conscious humour is seen by some critics as a Canadian version of the topical Norman Lear sitcoms of the 1970s, such as All in the Family and Maude.
After King of Kensington ended in 1980, head writer Louis Del Grande went on to create and star in Seeing Things, and Waxman was cast in the American series Cagney & Lacey.
In the first episode of the 1990s television series Twitch City, also set in Kensington, the character Nathan (played by Daniel MacIvor) was sent to prison for killing a homeless man with a can of cat food. The producers of Twitch City cast Al Waxman in the role of the murder victim, as a symbolic wink to King of Kensington, although they claimed that they did not at all intend for the character to be seen as Larry King himself. (It is, in fact, likely that killing the King of Kensington himself was the original intention, but that the producers backtracked when it became clear that many Canadian viewers would never accept such a fate for one of Canadian television's most beloved sitcom characters.)
Some TV critics have suggested that the current American sitcom King of Queens is similar in some respects to King of Kensington.
Following Waxman's death on January 17, 2001, a memorial to him was erected in Kensington Market.
