Everything gets revived eventually these days, and yet this is still a biggie: Some three years after the idea was first floated, Variety is reporting, The Kids in the Hall, the beloved sketch comedy show featuring the titular Canadian troupe, is coming back, this to Amazon Prime. The fab five — that is, Dave Foley, Mark McKinney, Bruce McCulloch, Scott Thompson, and Kevin McDonald — have reunited plenty of times, but this will be the first time they’ll be producing new episodes with new sketches.
The group’s show ran for five seasons between 1988 and 1995, airing on HBO and CBC Television in their native Canada. SNL honcho Lorne Michaels, who had hired McKinney and McCulloch as writers for his own deathless sketch show, but wisely realized they worked better together. The result never took off the way SNL had, but it scratched the same weirdo cult itch as Monty Python’s Flying Circus before it and Mr. Show and That Mitchell and Webb Look would later.
A movie (1996’s Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy) was a notorious bomb, and the members soon went their separate ways; at that point Foley already had a steady gig on NewsRadio, while McKinney was himself an SNL cast member, where he would remain until 1997. But both the show and movie lived on via Comedy Central reruns and DVD box sets. The Kids reunited in 2010 for the one-off non-sketch show Death Comes to Town.
There’s no word yet on when Amazon’s The Kids on the Hall revival will bow, but there’s surely plenty of time to plow through its 100 episodes once more. Feel free to get into the mood by watching one of their stranger sketches, the one about restaurant “dipping areas.”
(Via Variety)
