Netflix Revives SCTV, Canada’s Six-Season Sketch Comedy Touchstone

By Daniel Okafor

Netflix now makes available the six-season archive of SCTV, the Canadian sketch series (short comic scenes) that began in 1976, according to Jason Zinoman’s guide. The release gives the catalogue a new life, in Zinoman’s assessment, and restores access to one of the funniest and most singular comedies ever shown on television.

Zinoman, a critic at large for the Culture section of The Times and author of a comedy column, reached that judgment after watching the entire archive. His selective guide identifies 10 hallmarks and recommends particular episodes and sketches.

He also finds fault with the new Netflix documentary, SCTV: The Greatest Show You’ve Never Heard Of, for stopping at a surface-level history.

In Sorry, We’re Funny, his new book about Canadian comedy, Kliph Nesteroff argues that SCTV, short for Second City TV, created “a recognized style” of national comedy. Zinoman’s criticism rests on that gap. A cast list and chronology cannot, by themselves, explain a style.

Zinoman dates the programme’s creation to a direct response to Saturday Night Live, after that show poached Canadian talent including Gilda Radner and Dan Aykroyd. The premise supplied another answer. Each episode covered one day of broadcasting at a fictional network, creating satirical space (mockery aimed at a target) for fake talk shows, sitcoms, news and more.

What does SCTV put on the air?

Zinoman identifies John Candy, Catherine O’Hara, Eugene Levy, Joe Flaherty, Dave Thomas and Andrea Martin as the core cast. Harold Ramis served as head writer (the principal writer) during the first two years.

Zinoman credits Ramis with strengthening the early run. He describes two later arrivals as huge jolts of comedic energy: Rick Moranis in Season 3 and Martin Short at the end of Season 4. Their timing matters because the cast kept changing beneath a stable fictional broadcast structure.

Why do its cultural mash-ups work?

Zinoman borrows a comic term: “putting a hat on a hat.” In comedy, the phrase means an unnecessary bit that distracts from the core idea. He sees no sign that anyone at SCTV worried about the warning.

Zinoman describes a show that moved between highbrow and low material. It preferred excess and unpredictability to tidy structures. His examples include:

• The television show Fantasy Island.
• The classic films Casablanca and The Wizard of Oz.
• The comedy team Hope and Crosby.

Mixing these sources resembles cramming four television channels into one afternoon. SCTV also imagined Jerry Lewis in an Ingmar Bergman film. The conceit put two recognizable names into one incompatible frame. That collision is the point. The mess was the method.

What does Netflix still need to explain?

In Zinoman’s account, the archive omits a few shows cut for political sensitivities. The release gives SCTV new life, but the documentary still does not go far enough to answer what defines the show.

Zinoman says he built the selective guide to 10 hallmarks after bingeing the entire catalogue, then added suggestions for episodes and sketches to watch. His criticism is not that the history is missing. It is that the history does not yet define the style. Nesteroff’s “recognized style” needs a fuller account of the fictional network, changing cast and improbable pairings.

Netflix has restored the evidence. The next useful step is a fuller companion account that explains how the show made its excess coherent.