'The Kids in the Hall' Canadian icons return for new series on Amazon's Prime Video

After a 27 year hiatus from The Kids in the Hall series, the iconic Canadian comedy troupe, Kevin McDonald, Bruce McCulloch, Scott Thompson, Mark McKinney and Dave Foley are back with a new eight-episode series on Amazon's Prime Video May 13.

“I think we've been wanting this for quite a few years and we've been kind of pursuing it haphazardly for the last five years,” Scott Thompson told Yahoo Canada. “It all just kind of came together at once in kind of a perfect storm.”

“I think there's so much happening in the world now that it was just fascinating for us to be able to come back and put something back into culture,” Bruce McCulloch added. “The Kids in the Hall are a very weird group of people and there's no rhyme or reason, and we just sort of gather like the weather.”

“You know [when] you see 70 birds on the road and [your] like, why are they flying together in that weird way and hitting those telephone poles, that’s us… We hit a telephone pole and that was our show.”

The best way to describe the new The Kids in the Hall is a continuation for the previous show, which ran from 1988 to 1995. Even though a significant amount of time has passed, this troupe of comedians is still as funny, if not more funny, than you’ll remember them.

If you remember the end of the original The Kids in the Hall series, we saw the troupe being buried, with dirt thrown in their faces while they laid side-by-side in the ground. Very cleverly, the new eight-episode series starts with them rising from the hole they were buried in all those years ago.

“I think every one of us thinks it was their idea,” Thompson said.

“It’s obvious but sometimes obvious ideas are quite good and I think that one is,” McCulloch added.

The plot for The Kids coming back into the world is sparked by their film Brain Candy finally breaking even after someone buys it for a dollar, "I thought it would take a week, it took 30 years," they joke in the first episode of the show.

'The characters are aging with us'

Without ruining the specifics of who we see in the new series, we will say that it has a lot of touchstones for fans of the original to embrace. But don't get that confused with the series lacking originality, nothing about this new show feels like recycled content. This comedy troupe really establishes why they are so iconic with a cult-like following of obsessive fans, all these years later, still bringing truly funny and fresh comedy to our screens.

“Scott is a character-actor and he talks about the world through his characters, and so he has an idea for Buddy Cole, he wants to do Buddy Cole, I have an idea for Fran and Gordon,...I'm carrying Fran over the threshold,” Bruce McCulloch explained. “They just come if, because we're artists, you get an idea and you follow it, and if you didn't get it, you don't follow it.”

“The characters are aging with us, it's literally just, this is who we are at this moment in time,” Scott Thompson added. “Their souls are still the same, they behave the same way but they might look different, and we didn't mind letting them look different, because we sure do.”

“I also think specifically comic characters really never change because of the fact that they do things over and over again the same way, and repeat the same patterns, is funny... Wile E. Coyote still has never learned that anvil’s going to be around the corner."

In terms of what it’s like working together on a series again, McCulloch and Thompson say there is muscle memory there but, as Thompson puts it, “our muscles aren't quite what they used to be.”

“It's kind of the same, we've always been like a demolition derby and then we hit each other, and then we start going in the same direction, ultimately,” McCulloch said. “It's always been really loud, especially Scott, it's really exhausting and then we create some stuff and we had some fun, and we had some tussle, and wow look what we made.”