The KitH miniseries Death Comes to Town has everything you'd expect from a primetime soap: death, sex, high tension, and trannies. If As The World Turns had taken a few tips from Scott Thompson they might not have been canceled.

By the third episode of Death Comes to Town you know that the personified Death has come to a suburban dwelling to watch a string of murders. These murders result in souls that Death snorts like cocaine. Mystery surrounds each murder, and as complicated as it is, there is still an air of the days when the troupe was supported by Lorne Michaels. In the following clip, that works as a standalone sketch, you have to wonder what some of the lines would have sounded like if read by thespians working with serious faces.

[There was a video here]

While the narrative of Death Comes to Town is all-encompassing, the art of the sketch is stretched to it's limits just as it was from 1988-1994. The original Kids in the Hall took place at a time where a generation of comedic minds were making attempts to translate what SNL and Monty Python had perfected in the sixties and the seventies. The Kids in the Hall show took a route that couldn't be replicated and could hardly be compared to what had been edgy before it's arrival. The brilliant Canadian form of evolved burlesque would go on to influence more people than it realizes, even those that felt alienated.

This new Kids in the Hall offering has aged appropriately, but it still holds the same context in relation to what is considered funny. A sketch like "The Affair" (below) from the original series is a perfect example of how hilarious literal translation can be if portrayed through the voice of a clown. If compared to the above scene from the series currently running on IFC Friday nights you can see the difference between the old and the young, its seamless.