For a lot of people watching TV today, Lorn Michaels's Canadian sketch comedy troupe The Kids in the Hall was once something of a pop culture underground entity. They consisted of an all-male group of improv performers out of Canada and between 1989 and 1995 they provided a thoroughly surreal alternative to Saturday Night Live. The show was, without a doubt, the strangest comedy show on TV in the 90's, but it had an especially subversive appeal due to its overtly homosexual content, among other things. While SNL has long enjoyed its tenure as a late-night weekend show on NBC, Kids in the Hall came to America exclusively on HBO where its considerably more controversial content would escape the rampant censorship of American network television. The show was always weird and had no obvious obligation to the mainstream, which set it apart from most televised sketch comedy of the decade. After the troupe's wantonly weird feature film Brain Candy, a satire of the pharmaceutical industry and its effects on modern society, breezed through theaters, Kids in the Hall more or less disappeared from pop culture. Earlier this year they resurfaced for a miniseries called Death Comes to Town for Canada's CBC network, eventually finding its way to the premium American station IFC this weekend.

Though we haven't heard from them in a long while, The Kids in the Hall are still as odd and strangely appealing as ever. In fact, the most striking part about Death Comes to Town is how it feels like it could have been produced at the height of the troupe's success on TV. But for a few cast members who look noticeably older and less svelte, the miniseries has the same atmosphere as the dreamy sketches the guys put together in the 90's. I suppose this might be a bit off-putting for newcomers to The Kids, but for those of us who grew up enjoying what they had to offer in the free-wheeling Gen-X decade it's a solid bit of nostalgia.

Death Comes to Town takes place in the fictional Ontario town of Shuckton, a small, boring place that, in the usual Kids style, is mostly unaware of how small and boring it truly is. The troupe mined some of its biggest laughs from the comic desperation of people who seemed both oblivious of the larger world and depressingly aware of how removed from it they actually were. For a classic example, check out the beautiful, heartbreaking and somehow still funny sketch Sausages. The plot of Death Comes to Town revolves around the death of Shuckton's mayor, played by The Kids frequent writer and star Bruce McCulloch. Mark McKinney, another Kids regular, plays the personification of Death, a codpiece-wearing drug addict who tools around Shuckton on a moped made of bones. This ostensibly makes the miniseries a murder mystery, but if you're looking for plot arc you obviously need to spend some time with a Kids in the Hall box set.

Death Comes to Town traffics in the same uncomfortable but undeniably funny setups that made The Kids in the Hall an irreplaceable part of the 90's. It's both drab and stimulating with its suburban drag queens and absurd depictions of everyday life, a throwback that is no less unusual or subversive despite relying on decade-old tropes. This may be an unintentional commentary on the slow evolution of pop culture, though it may also speak to the lasting power of the comedy pioneered by The Kids one generation ago.