SCTV – short for Second City Television – is one of most influential comedy shows ever created. In the 1970s and 80s, while North American comedy fans worshipped at the altar of Saturday Night Live, the comedy nerds loved SCTV. The Canadian sketch show was weird.
It was multilayered and years ahead of its time. Dave Thomas, head writer and an original cast member, was there from the start. We wrote at the top of our reference level.
And the idea was to see if the audience would meet us there.” Thomas was part of an astonishingly talented cast that included John Candy, Eugene Levy, Catherine O’Hara, Rick Moranis, Joe Flaherty, Martin Short, Harold Ramis and Andrea Martin. They wrote and starred in the series, which ran intermittently in Canada from 1976 to 1984. At a time when American shows dominated the airwaves, and homegrown content tended to be earnest factual programmes along the lines of Hinterland Who’s Who, Canadian audiences were delighted to see a show that reflected their culture while being – to everyone’s surprise – actually funny.
It even went on to find a late-night audience in the US. To celebrate its legacy, Netflix has just added 134 episodes of SCTV to coincide with its release of a new documentary – SCTV: The Greatest Show You’ve Never Heard Of. Like many of the show’s fans, Thomas isn’t exactly enamoured with the title.
That’s not the only problem. While it’s a decent primer for revisiting the show, featuring new interviews with the surviving cast members, including Thomas, the documentary could have been so much more. Many things are skipped over, such as the musical acts, including bands like the Boomtown Rats and the Plasmatics, who didn’t just perform but also appeared in sketches.
And while the cast took care of the writing in the show’s early days, they were later joined by talented staff. These omissions rankle with Thomas. I thought, what the fuck?
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