Skip to the TL;DR if you're not interested in the backstory.
So I had just been watching through the old Kids in the Hall series (early '90s bizarre sketch comedy show). Remembered enjoying it as a teenager but never had HBO so I only caught episodes here and there. Incidentally, Dave Foley went on to star with Joe Rogan in News Radio, a great '90s sitcom.
Still mostly as good as I remembered, minus the Scott Thompson-focused "look at teh gay!" sketches, particularly his monologues. No topical skits, just 5 white Canadian guys doing weird humor.
Finish up the final episode a few days ago. Fire up Prime Video (I only use it because I already pay for Prime delivery ... I know) to look for something decent to watch from a time when entertainment wasn't awful, and right up front I see a Kids in the Hall video that I didn't recognize. Get a feeling of dread. Look more closely: it appears to be all 5 original cast members looking like they're now in their 50s. Dread intensifies. Click for details. Released 2022.
I give it a 1% chance of being decent, a 1% chance of being bad but at least not awful propaganda, and a 98% of it being some flavor of unbearable woke. It's just not going to be easy for a bunch of 60-year-old guys to do edgy comedy even if they still are on their game. I like Foley and McDonald at least so I'll give it one episode.
I almost didn't make it past the first line of the first skit. In the original series, it was very rare for anyone except the primary cast members to speak. There were a few 'girlfriend' characters that got a line here and there and the "it's a fact" girl, but otherwise it was all the 5 regulars. Well, in this one, about the first thing that happens is a hipster looking Asian chick and a fat, ugly black chick start asking about a VHS copy of "Brain Candy." My Spidey senses told me to turn it off right there, but I guess I hate myself too much.
Next skit has one of the Kids playing a board member sitting at a large boardroom table (way higher budget than anything in the original series) completely surrounded by women, asking, "so having more women on the board benefits me ... how?" to which one responds, "it doesn't." (which is both true and unintentionally undercutting the whole "diversity is good!" argument but I digress)
TL;DR
So the very next skit, first one with Kevin McDonald and Dave Foley back together after 30 years, has them as thieves who just robbed somewhere. They're in their getaway car about to leave when they have the great idea to take their clothes off because "the cops won't be looking for naked people." So they do. And naturally the cops pull up, have them get out of the car. McDonald and Foley both exit the car, full frontal pudgy 60-year-old nudity. Cops have them jump up and down, which is done on goddamn camera. It wasn't funny. It was embarrassing.
After this, all 5 of the cast members strip down and pole dance.
And then to rub salt in the wound, every other speaking part in the episode was a woman of some random skin tone ... except one: Kids in the Hall fan #511. He was a pathetic white dude that lived with his mom.
Shit on the actors, shit on the original fans. I won't be watching the rest of the series.
I had a lot of straight and gay friends, and we loved KitH, including Thompson's Buddy Cole, who was a caricature-turned-up-to-eleven of a certain type of gay man:
"And that was that! We were together for six months; which in heterosexual terms is three reincarnations with the same mate."
"I'm in a new movie, Millennium. You see, one day an American producer said, 'hey, I want to make a terrible movie in Canada—everybody else has!' It's a big-budget-science-fiction-thriller starring Cheryl Ladd. I play the best friend of the Time Gate operator. He has one line... but he says it directly to me! The movie is full of Canadian actors with one line. It's great." And he breaks into a brutally cynical smile. "It .Won't .Make A. Dime."
Or the sketch that opens up with him in prison, telling the audience what led up to Buddy's accidental murder of a drag queen.
Probably my favorite KitH was Bruce McCullough. He wasn't always the funniest, but he had, hands down, the most bizarre sketches on that show.
One of my friends used the name "Francesca Fiori" as her pre-internet online BBS handle.
I remember liking the gay skits better as a kid, but this time around I found them obnoxious. I'm sure that's partially because I'm just sick of hearing about gays, but really, most of them didn't even have a point other than, "hey, look at the gay stuff I'm doing!" There were several skits that basically amounted to Thompson's characters sexually assaulting his castmates' characters, and hey it's funny because a guy is getting groped/raped!
Honestly, watching them again, almost every sketch with gay character(s) just made the gay character(s) look like awful human beings. Which may be what they were going for, but I suspect not.
McCullough's sketch concepts were definitely tough to top. His autist kid hit close to home. I always thought that McDonald and Foley had the best chemistry though, but that's probably mostly because they'd been working together longer than the rest of the group.
One of my favorite Bruce McCullough sketches https://youtu.be/HO0FxifkzFQ