The members of The Kids in the Hall are literally exhumed from a grave in the first episode of their sketch-comedy revival series on Amazon Prime Video, and they seem determined to pick up right where they left off. It's been nearly 30 years since the original The Kids in the Hall ended its five-season run, but the new version brings back not only the five members of the troupe but also the theme song, format, and many of the classic recurring characters. That's not to say that creators/stars Dave Foley, Bruce McCulloch, Kevin McDonald, Mark McKinney, and Scott Thompson are pretending that no time has passed. They've retained their signature sense of absurdist, self-aware humor, applying it to their older, more world-weary selves.
That begins with the first episode's opening sketch, featuring a grizzled-looking Thompson at a yard sale, selling a beat-up copy of the group's disastrous 1996 movie The Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy. By making $1 on the sale, he finally puts the movie in the black, triggering a clause that sets the Kids free from their grave and returns them to sketch comedy. Right from the start, they put themselves out there, embracing and mocking their greatest failure and making light of their inadvertent position as comedy elder statesmen.
They also put themselves out there literally, as Foley and McDonald strip down for full-frontal nudity a few sketches later as a pair of bank robbers who evade authorities by reasoning that the cops are only looking for clothed suspects. Later in the first episode, all five Kids appear in a sketch as geriatric male strippers for an audience of screaming women who go crazy for their comfortable clothes and curmudgeonly moves. Even many of the recognizable returning characters are now older, if not wiser, and McCulloch gets called out for still playing his popular annoying-kid character Gavin at his age.
The five episodes available for review -- out of eight total -- all rely on familiar characters for laughs, but that doesn't mean that The Kids in the Hall is a show coasting on past glories. Fans would revolt if Thompson's Buddy Cole or McKinney's Headcrusher didn't make appearances, and the Kids find ways to evolve some of those characters without losing the essence of what makes them funny. In some cases, as with Gavin, it's enough just to show the character briefly before moving on.
In terms of new material, there are several sketches that were first introduced in The Kids in Hall's live shows in the '00s, which now get expanded treatment for TV. The troupe's humor is generally timeless, rooted in surreal ridiculousness rather than pop-culture references or takes on current events, and one of the weakest sketches in the new season is an attempt to parody inappropriate behavior in Zoom meetings. The Kids in the Hall is better when it sticks to bizarre concepts that double down on their strangeness, mining laughs from unexpected swerves into new, often darker territory.
That darkness is balanced with silliness, something that the Kids didn't quite get right on their last reunion effort, the 2010 miniseries Death Comes to Town, which told an eight-episode long-form story. That murder mystery was a bit too straightforward and linear to play to the group's strengths, and they do best when falling back on their familiar format. The Kids in the Hall, which originally aired from 1989 to 1995, has now influenced generations of future sketch comedians, but these five guys are still better at it than nearly anyone.
The cast has all gone on to varying degrees of success in other projects, from Foley's starring role on classic sitcom NewsRadio to Thompson's one-man stage productions, but there's no sense here of any particular member outshining the rest or any of them getting left behind. Whatever differences they may have had that marred the production of Brain Candy, those are long past, and the group's comedic chemistry is as strong as ever in all of their various configurations. Foley and McDonald can do a pitch-perfect takedown of each other's comedic personas in a sketch that is both good-natured and ruthless.
The Kids in the Hall is so obviously influential that it seems superfluous for each episode to have a "Friend of The Kids in the Hall" segment, featuring comedy all-stars like Pete Davidson, Catherine O'Hara, Kenan Thompson, and more expressing their appreciation for the Kids. There's an entire documentary, The Kids in the Hall: Comedy Punks, exploring the group's importance that premieres on Amazon Prime Video next week, so adding more testimonials seems like overkill. The special guest stars play offbeat characters as "fans" of The Kids in the Hall, rather than just talking as themselves, so there's an added comic element, even if it's still a bit underwhelming.
Those segments are brief, and most of The Kids in the Hall sticks to what works, just as it worked decades ago. Time and age haven't dulled the Kids' brilliance, and the only major disappointment is that it took them this long to return.
All eight episodes of The Kids in the Hall premiere Friday, May 13 on Amazon Prime Video.