We’re now halfway through the Kids In The Hall’s big television comeback, a murder mystery narrative, and it’s one of the best new comedies I’ve seen in a long time. While they’ve freely admitted to the influence of The League of Gentlemen on the format, it actually has more in common with Psychoville. This is at its most obvious in the opening episode where it similarly suffers on the laugh front from having to introduce so many characters and plot elements. Though unlike Psychoville however, KITH aren’t so in love with horror movies that it gets in the way of the funny. I always got the feeling from Psychoville that Pemberton and Sheersmith were actually those “How Many Kills?” teenagers from The League of Gentlemen when they were younger. And possibly hadn’t grown up all that much.
In fact Death Comes To Town is very light and whimsical in its handling of material that could have easily been made spooky and creepy. As grotesque as some of the characters are, there’s a degree of sympathy in their portrayals. While it’s shed the sketch show element of their earlier work, the actual performances of the older Kids are far beyond their old work. This is reflected in the characters who, by and large, are new creations.
Of the main characters, only Bruce McCulloch & Mark McKinney cop characters have been imported from original KITH show intact, though others appear as cameos (The Chicken Lady showed up briefly in episode 4) and other characters are extensions of types they’ve portrayed before. McKinney’s Death character feels like a deadbeat version of his Satan and Kevin McDonald’s public defence lawyer is a variation of the multitude of twitchy neurotics he’s portrayed over the years.
Another big difference is that there are plenty of non-KITH performers showing up too, from original (pre-TV) KITH member Luciano Casimiri as The Prabbi (Half Priest-Half Rabbi) to Colin Mochrie as an exploitative vet who has kept McDonald’s lawyer characters cat alive for 30+ years.
The greatest thing about it though is that as well as having great gags and great performances, it also legitimately works as a mystery. Not only is it slowly revealing more about the murder the show hinges around, there’s also a secondary set of mysteries surrounding Death. Like a lot of the characters he started off one-note, but as we get more and more glimpses of his past, he becomes a lot more complex and more questions are raised.
You’ll have to be Canadian to watch it at the moment, or do a decent impression of one on the internet, and as much as I’d hope we’d get this over in the UK, the fact we only got 13 episodes of KITH in the first place doesn’t exactly bode well. It’ll be a shame as it’s one of two recent comedies (both from creators making comebacks of sorts) that really gave me some confidence about TV comedy again.
I apologise, because you if you like to laugh, you should be watching it. You’ll need to be an American or able to convince the internet you are one to watch it, but it’s a great show that seems to find a happy medium between the three camera and single camera sitcoms.
Technically, it’s a single camera sitcom, but unlike most single camera shows of the last decade, it lacks decadence and is written with the economy of a three camera sitcom.
As great as Arrested Development was, the reason it failed was because it was too expensive per episode. The massive cast, the various locations and numerous outside shoots all added up. Same with My Name Is Earl. Better Off Ted feels like it’s learnt from those mistakes (and not just because Portia Rossi’s in the show too).
It’s a comedy about production development centred around a company called Veridian Dynamic who make anything and everything. Its level of absurdity calls to mind The I.T. Crowd and Dilbert somewhat, though the RPG nerds among you will probably see it as the rightful heir of the R&D gags from Paranoia.
The economy of the writing lies in that they tend to use only a few regular sets per episode (two offices, a meeting room and a lab), few-to-none outside scenes, and there are only 5-6 characters (the daughter doesn’t appear every episode).
Something else I’ve noted is that while they’ll use the 21st century’s favourite gag of “You remember the time…” they’ll tend to let the dialogue do the lifting on the gag, rather than cut away to flashback. And having seen cutaway gags far too often in the last 10-20 years, it’s refreshing to let the dialogue do the work.
Which is not to say it’s all dialogue heavy, there’s plenty of physical and prop gags, but they are in service of episode or character, rather than throwaway stuff put in to pad an unfunny story.
I’ve just got into this great podcast/web show that Kevin Pollak’s been doing this year, after hearing Scott Aukerman mention it on Comedy Death Ray Radio (which is also great and something you should check out). Here’s the recent episode with Weird Al:
Following the return of the show on the BBC last week, I went back and watched the first series again. The first thing that strikes you is how much more straight it’s played compared to what follows. Of course at the time it still seemed pretty out of the ordinary, but the questions are much more sensible than they ended up, and the sketch show element isn’t present yet.
The big changing point feels like the Christmas episode, with the incredibly over the top musical opening that felt like Big Night Out, but with a Two Ronnies budget, Vic and Bob’s bizarre variety dreams made flesh. Then we get the clip round, where we see a clip from the “Roswell Incident”, a skit acted by Vic and Bob, rather than the archive footage they’d been using for the round up to this point.
The change is reflected in the credits, up until the Xmas episode, the show had a question researcher. With the Xmas episode’s new direction of just utter nonsense, that’s no longer needed. Also missing in the credits is Simon Ross (Jonathan’s brother) as “Format Consultant”. It’s now the show everyone remembers, pure Vic and Bob, guided by the hand of the Fast Show’s Charlie Higson as script supervisor.
Saw this cartoon based on Martin Short’s SCTV/SNL character for the first time this week. Albeit in washed out, nth generation tape-o-vision via the evil powers of the internet. It’s surprisingly “totally decent” for a 1980s Hanna Barbera cartoon. This is for a number of reasons.
- Martin Short, Catherine O’Hara, Andrea Martin, Joe Flaherty and Jonathan Winters doing the voices, with Eugene Levy, Dave Thomas, Christopher Guest and Ringo Starr (?!) showing up as needed.
- The show has a formula, which is amusing in itself in how it gets shoehorned into the story.
- Ed Grimley segment
- Gustav Brothers segment (in which the brothers try and explain the science behind the pickle Ed is in)
- Ed Grimley segment
- Count Floyd’s Scary Stories segment (which Ed is actually watching in the cartoon)
- Ed Grimley segment.
- Ed himself is interestingly animated, even if a lot of the other characters look like they’ve walked in from an animation based on some stale newspaper strip. Ed though, really captures the physical aspects of Martin Short’s performances.
- Joe Flaherty’s live action Count Floyd segments (another SCTV character). I think it was an episode of Doug Benson’s I Love Movies, where they pointed out that Joe Flaherty could pretty much do his Sammy Maudlin character straight and it would work. Well he comes kind of close to playing Count Floyd straight here, with an actual audience of (acting) kids. However just as his scary movies on SCTV were somewhat lame, his scary stories are similarly lame here.
- The writing is really good. Most episodes involve Ed setting off to do something that should be really easy, but ends up incredibly complicated. Then on top of that you’ve got plots that play with the pop culture of the target audiences parents (or even grandparents). So you get an episode with a lot of Bob Hope in it, another with a murderous Bing Crosby, and one which shows what happened to the farm in Wizard of Oz while Dorothy was in her coma. And because Ed is written interacting with other characters, he comes across less annoying than he does in Short’s hyperactive monologues with the character. With Martin Short and Michael Short both involved with the creative side of things, as well as all the SCTV alumni, it perhaps feels the most like a proper SCTV spinoff of any of their post-SCTV projects.
Having a day off post-Ayacon so naturally I’m watching kids comedy shows on BBC2. Particularly struck by the sketch comedy version the popular Horrible Histories books. The episode that just aired closed with this skit, in which George I, George II, George III and George IV are portrayed as a boy band.
Between this and “Sorry, I’ve Got No Head” that I caught some of over Xmas, kids sketch comedy is probably much better right now than what passes for adult sketch comedy (Mitchell & Webb excluded, and that shares writers/performers with both these kids shows anyway).
Kind of too busy to Urusei Yatsura it up this week, so light posting until the weekend I think. Starting with this song from Garfunkel and Oates.
