By Liam Lacey
Rating: B-plus
The Kids in the Hall are back, 27 years since the last episode of their eponymous television show (1989 to 1995) on CBC in Canada, CBS, HBO and Comedy Central in the United States. The troupe of writer-performers who are kids no more — Dave Foley (59), Bruce McCulloch (61), Kevin McDonald (60), Mark McKinney (62) and S c ott Thompson (62) — have a new eight-part series on Prime Video, which begins today. It will be followed later this month by Reg Harkema’s recent Hot Docs documentary, The Kids in the Hall: Comedy Punks. (Seriously, can anyone except Iggy Pop still call themselves a punk after 60?)
If SCTV was the crème of Canadian comedy, The Kids are at least the high-caloric half-and-half, and I approached this new series with the anticipation of watching a high-wire act: How can the irreverent brats of yesterday maintain their iconoclastic edge while participating in the nostalgic ‘90s comedy revival (Will & Grace, Mad About You)?

Older than Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Fallon, the Kids are closing in on Bill Maher territory, where disdain for authority risks looking like reactionary griping. Age also puts certain practical limits on the troupe’s shape-shifting range: With the right prosthetics, young can play old and thin can play fat, but the reverse is harder to pull off.
Happily, In the first five of eight episodes offered to the press, the material is all new, or at least, new to television. Some of the sketches (Imaginary Girlfriend, Super Drunk) had previous incarnations in the Kids Reunion in 2007 at the Just For Laughs festival and the 2008 North American tour.

There are a few familiar characters from the distant TV show and the Brain Candy movie: Buddy Cole, office buddies Kathy and Cathy, the two cops, the corporate chief Don (McKinney) and his lackey, Marv (Foley) and, briefly, Mr. Tyzik the head-crusher. And, of course, the Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet’s musical theme, which, more than a quarter century later, induces a Pavlovian sense of anticipation.
From the outset, the Kids put these issues of age, and nostalgia front and center, though not in warmly wry tone of The Kominsky Method or Grace and Frankie. The first episode sees Scott Thompson as a white-haired old hippie at a garage sale, where a couple of young women pick up a VHS copy of Brain Candy, the unfortunate 1996 Kids in the Hall movie.

He warns them against buying it, explaining that it was created by a deal with the devil. “The reviews were mixed, at best,” he advises. (From my original Globe and Mail review: “Comedy? Not quite. Anyone for wittily depressed?”)
When one young woman buys the tape for a loony, though, the effect is seismic: The loony means the film has finally broken even, and a curse is lifted.

A corporate boss named Don (McKinney), speaking in producer Lorne Michaels’ pinched tones, orders the Kids to be reassembled. A plus-sized man wrapped in a sheet (the beloved Kids writer Paul Bellini) wanders through a shrub-filled field, climbs onto a excavator, where he turns over a tombstone and unearths the five members of the troupe, who awake from the dead: “Am I still the cute one?” asks Foley.
A scene later, the Kids happily show us what time can do, as McDonald and Foley, as a couple of Pay Day Loan outlet robbers who don’t want to be identified by their clothes, show us exactly what time can do: Both men strip to the buff, showing their jiggly bits, including bits that shouldn’t be wiggling.
Fretfulness and annoyance was always part of the Kids attitude, and now those qualities have a middle-aged spin. Changes in mores, losses of standards, misguided aspirations are repeated themes: Kathy (Thompson) and Kathy (McCulloch), middle-aged women office-workers, mourn the end of the Fax Era, and send out the last fax to outer space. (On the other hand, awkwardness of the Zoom era is celebrated in an extended episode where everyone in a business meeting goes full Jeffrey Toobin.)

In another sketch, fussy middle-aged staff at a fancy restaurant go to extremes to stop a woman from posting their exquisite wild berry French tarte, which she insists on calling a “little pie.” When one of the waiters volunteers to sacrifice himself for the cause, another demurs: “You’re the baby. You’re only 59.” The episode ends with a fake doc about a troupe of 60-year-old strippers, somewhat reminiscent of the plot of The Full Monty.
From episode to episode, there are obvious echoes and call backs. We have, not one, but two sketches about couples visiting an obstetrician; There are a couple of “mating rites of foreigners” bits: A Spanish couple seeking marriage counseling, and a sedentary French menage-a-trois. In parallel to the two Kathys mourning the last fax machine, we have, in one of the best sketches, Scott Thompson’s Buddy Cole, taking a young protégé on a tour of the gay village, who discovers the “last glory hole” leading to a moment of “gay-ja vu”.
I also enjoyed the mixture of absurdity and pathos in Super Drunk, Bruce McCulloch’s character, a “twice-divorced mattress salesman” who, with his trusty bartender friend (Foley) turns into the crime-fighting super-hero. (“He’s slurring his words — his powers are kicking in!”). That scene has a parallel in a less-rewarding bit about group of middle-aged men who form a neighbourhood patrol, offended by everything from off-leash dogs to perfectly good old television sets being thrown in the dumpster.
True to their history, The Kids often provide more of a cerebral tickle than a reach for an outright laugh. In an echo of the opening meta-sequence, McDonald plays a pawnbroker, buying a VHS tape from Foley’s character, and both end up breaking character. Not hilarious, but interesting. To be honest, other segments just don’t land and over-subtlety isn’t the problem., Each episode, for example, includes a sort of comedy celebrity endorsement (Samantha Bee, Catherine O’Hara, Pete Davidson, Kenan Thompson) doing minute-long videos pretending to be a Kids in the Hall fans and trying to be funny. It feels like reading dust jacket blurbs.
Also, the intermittent gross-out scenes feel like the series’ most dated element (even if one character says in an extended toilet humour sketch “I’m commenting on the phenomenon, not endorsing it.”) I’ve already seen a Canadian comic use a new-born baby’s umbilical chord like a yo-yo (Tom Green in Freddy Got Fingered) and the re-animated bust of Shakespeare spouting blood and guts has nothing on the Knights Who Say Ni from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. At this point, such messiness is not really becoming of men of The Kids in the Hall’s vintage.

CLICK HERE to watch Bonnie Laufer’s interview with The Kids in the Hall’s Bruce McCulloch.

CLICK HERE to watch Bonnie Laufer’s interview with The Kids in the Hall’s Dave Foley and Mark McKinney
The Kids in the Hall is now available on Prime Video.

The Kids in the Hall Reboot: Older and Wryer, with More Jiggly Bits

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