When Amazon forked over money to revive The Kids in the Hall, they must have known what they were buying. The iconic Canadian sketch comedy show were not above going meta; one sketch pointed out how much the nation’s taxpayers were unwittingly helping fund the program. So when the revival’s first trailer dropped, it was no surprise that there was a fair amount of ribbing of their new corporate overlords.
The ad finds the old gang literally exhumed from the earth, 27 years older than when their titular show last aired (it ran from 1988 to 1995), with Bruce McCullouch wishing they had “cryogenically frozen our bodies.” We then see Dave Foley and Mark McKinney as execs, the former asking who’s funding the reboot. “The Devil again?” he asks, to which McKinney’s character responds, “Well, sort of: Amazon.” Foley’s character later speculates that the super-corporation founded by a guy who keeps going to space wants “a funny show but one that is free of targets, topical topics, alarming edginess or unsettling settings.”
A number of beloved Kids in the Hall characters show their faces: McCullouch’s pestering, backpack-loving Gavin and masked tennis maven the Eradicator; McKinney’s “Headcrusher”; the secretaries; and, of course, Scott Thompson’s monologuist Buddy Cole. (Yes, Kevin McDonald is in there too, who hopefully dusts off his enabling boss character from the great “Girl Drink Drunk” sketch.) There’s even the restaurant staff from the semi-deep cut “dipping areas” sketch, which, if you’ve never seen, you can watch below.
The new The Kids in the Hall drops on Amazon Prime on May 13. You can watch the trailer above.