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 It might be veering into hyperbole to suggest that The Kids In The Hall changed the face of sketch comedy, but it’s fair to suggest that their influence on the sketch comedy that followed is probably greater than the still-kicking uncle dying from cancer of sketch, Saturday Night Live. Sure, the later is the grandpappy everyone is forced to acknowledge as an influence, but it’s the Kids’ style that we see more often creep into modern sketch. While SNL still leans on the same formula after 30 years, these days drilling B-grade characters into the ground in painfully unending sketches – something this once great show has been doing for at least 10 years now - The Kids In The Hall relied not so much on time-tested formula, but on doing whatever the fuck they wanted.
And what they wanted was often bizarre, surreal, and all over the map.
Spiritual oneness with your dog. Cannibalism. Gay men who style their hair during emotional distress. Cabbies turned doctors. Just a few of the oddities featured in their fourth season. Unlike SNL, they didn’t invent a small roster of distinctive characters and return to them week after week after week in skits that bore amazing resemblance to the skits from the week before. Hell no. As Dave Foley told us, they wanted to do something they had never seen before. And that usually meant it was something the viewer had never seen before.
I confess, when The Kids In The Hall first hit the airwaves, I didn’t know what to make of it. Some of the sketches didn’t seem to have a punchline or joke or gag. They were just kind of there. Some were just plain weird. And they still are! What the hell was going through their heads? I still don’t know. What I do know is that somehow, some way, they made it work.
Season four opens up with a sketch featuring Bruce McCulloch, one of the five core Kids – Scott Thompson, Dave Foley, Kevin McDonald and Mark McKinney are the others – and a dog. Bruce McCulloch and a dog, on a couch, watching TV. And then they look into one another’s eyes, the lighting goes soft, sweet music plays, and McCulloch dances around giddily. The end.
 Do you not quite know how you’re supposed to respond? That’s The Kids In The Hall.
But once you sit down and allow yourself to enter their world, you realize that this stuff is funny as hell. It doesn’t need to have a big, obvious punchline or zinger at the end. It doesn’t need to rely on some recognizable and familiar character (because you’ve seen him or her in a sketch a week every week for five years) in order to work. The Kids just take these often outlandish, nonsensical ideas, throw them up against a wall, and see what sticks.
Season 4 follows in the footsteps of the previous three, offering tons of surreal, cross-dressing, blood-spurting, off-kilter, rule-breaking, flamboyantly gay humor that fails as often as it succeeds, but is all the stronger for it. By this time some internal strife among the comedy troupe was slowly making itself known – their film, Brain Candy, was a nightmare for most of the Kids thanks to this in-fighting – and some of the freshness from the earlier seasons is a bit drained since by now we knew what we were getting from them (sort of), but in the end what you have here is a season of sketch comedy that stacks up against just about anything else out there.
Toss in the fact that these are the uncut, uncensored episodes, not the neutered versions seen on Comedy Central, and you have yourself a winner
 Presentation
This was a TV show, so set your expectations properly. It looks quite good – decent picture, no major flaws on the print, probably a touch better than broadcast quality – but it’s also far from a revelation as far as DVD quality goes. As with any television set, it is what it is. And what this is, is a very nice transfer of a sketch comedy show. Adjust your expectations accordingly and you’ll be pleased with what you have.
On the sound front, well, it’s pretty much the same. Maybe a bit better. Dolby Digital stereo, nice and clear, though not something that will get your subwoofers thumping. But then, it’s a sketch comedy show from late 80s/early 90s TV. What else would you expect?
Extras
A very nice batch of extras on this set really adds to the value. We’ve got some new audio commentary recorded in 2005 by the Kids, very informative and funny stuff that really helps put what they were trying to do in perspective. No, it’s not on every episode – in fact, on just a few – but it’s something every Kids fan will want to hear. A pair of "Best of" compilations brings together some favorite sketches from Season 4. Normally this sort of thing feels like a really cheap, throwaway extra (as a rule I hate “highlights  from the season” bonus features), but because of the skit-based nature of the show this works perfectly. Nice selections and a solid bonus. We’ve got a bit of archival footage of stuff that wasn’t broadcast that should be of interest, and rounding things off are the usual picture galleries and trailers.
The Bottom Line
They honed their craft in Canadian clubs, hit the airwaves a few years later and would have had us scratching our heads in befuddlement if we weren’t laughing so hard. To this day the legacy of The Kids In The Hall is felt in the surreal, scattered and indefinable comedy we see on Comedy Central and MTV, as well as posted on the Internet by people with too much time on their hands. More than 10 years later, it not only remains fresh and funny, it’s still better than Saturday Night Live.
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