The Kids Are All Right

The "Hall" gang is alive – and mocking Death. Check out the promising promo

There's no sign of the Chicken Lady or the Head Crusher – but Death is lurking in the Hall.

The promo for the return of The Kids in the Hall has hit the Internet, giving us a taste of what we've missed since "Brain Candy" a dozen years ago.

The Canadian quintet is starring in “Death Comes to Town,” an eight-part, comic murder-mystery TV series set to debut next month in the Great White North. Death – personified in a bike-riding, fire-urinating hellion played by Mark McKinney – wreaks havoc in a small Canadian town.

It's a chance for McKinney, Dave Foley, Bruce McCulloch, Kevin McDonald and Scott Thompson to inhabit dozens of small-town provincials – characters high on quirk and the grotesque, like the ones they created during the TV show that established them as the spiritual successors to Monty Python. While the Pythons are celebrating their 40th anniversary, it's been 25 years since the Kids formed and slowly began building cult status south of the (Canadian) border.

Judging from the preview footage, featured on Funny or Die, the new mini-series seems to have a feel similar to "Little Britain," a Python and Kids-influenced two-man, multi-character UK favorite, which was imported to HBO for a U.S.-set version last year.

It's unclear, though, when "Death" will make it to U.S. television. A lot has changed since the group’s only film, the hilariously perverse and underrated "Brain Candy," was released in 1996, long before the Web was fully woven. Fans, no doubt, will be looking online for a fix once the new shows air in Canada.

Meanwhile, check out the clip below for a promising sign that the Kids are all right.

Hester is founding director of the award-winning, multi-media NYCity News Service at the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism. He is the former City Editor of the New York Daily News, where he started as a reporter in 1992. Follow him on Twitter.

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