Dave Foley’s The Kids In The Hall Is Back
The Kids are coming back!
This article is more than 2 years old
The legendary Canadian comedy group The Kids in the Hall now has deals with Amazon Prime for multiple projects. In 2020, it was announced that the quintet of Dave Foley, Bruce McCulloch, Kevin McDonald, Mark McKinney, and Scott Thompson had made a deal with the streaming platform branch of mega-company Amazon to revive their eponymous show. Their eight-episode season has not yet been released, but will be once again produced by Saturday Night Live’s Lorne Michaels. More recently, Amazon purchased a docuseries by Blue Ant Studios called The Kids in the Hall: Comedy Punks at the SXSW film festival. Reportedly, the two part documentary will examine the group’s forty year career, which has included five seasons of TV sketch comedy, a cult film named Brain Candy, several live tours and an enormous amount of influence on modern comedy.
The Kids in the Hall formed in Toronto in the mid-1980s as several different pairings of the core five members eventually came together. Despite several early setbacks and brief breakups, the Kids eventually managed to connect with Lorne Michaels and produce a TV pilot. They were marketed as something of an alternative to Saturday Night Live, featuring surreal humor, bizarre recurring characters and direct to camera monologues. Although the group was never a mainstream breakout success, their unique brand of humor proved extremely influential on the alt-comedy wave of the 1980s and 1990s. The Kids in the Hall: Comedy Punks will feature interviews with many comedians on their effects, including Lewis Black, Janeane Garofalo, Eddie Izzard, Matt Walsh and Reggie Watts. It also apparently features never before seen footage of the group from their earliest days.
Amazon Prime’s revival of The Kids in the Hall for a new season and their purchase of The Kids in the Hall: Comedy Punks come as part of the streaming platforms push to compete with the ever-expanding content of its competitors Netflix and Disney+. Amazon Prime is set to unveil the first look at its high fantasy series, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, at the upcoming Super Bowl LVI on February 13. It will reportedly be the most expensive television production in history, with estimated costs of nearly half a billion dollars. Comparatively speaking, nabbing The Kids in the Hall was probably decently priced. Of course, Amazon Prime also has the gritty superhero shows The Boys and Invincible, as well as several upcoming spinoffs of the former, so they do not seem all that worried about spending money.
The various members of The Kids in the Hall all experienced degrees of success during and after the original run of their show. Dave Foley broke through into the mainstream with the hit NBC sitcom NewsRadio in the 1990s, which starred an ensemble cast including him, Stephen Root and Andy Dick. It also served as a launchpad for comedian Joe Rogan, who would later act as the host of a game show named Fear Factor in which contestants frequently had to eat insects for money. More recently, he has become a controversial podcast host. The Kids in the Hall: Comedy Punks does not yet have a release date.
