SCTV: The Greatest Show You’ve Never Heard Of premieres October 30 on Netflix.
By Elazar Abrahams
Netflix’s four-documentary October comedy lineup ends with a look at a group rather than an individual. SCTV: The Greatest Show You’ve Never Heard Of explores the Canadian sketch series that brought Catherine O’Hara, Eugene Levy, John Candy, Martin Short, Andrea Martin, Rick Moranis, Dave Thomas, and Joe Flaherty together at the same improbable moment.
That is an incredible collection of talent, and the documentary makes a convincing case that SCTV deserves to be remembered as one of the most important comedy institutions of its era. These people were all in Toronto, working together in a relatively small television production, and then they went on to define huge parts of modern comedy. The show feels underappreciated now, especially compared to the fame of the performers who came out of it.
The film’s strongest material comes when the surviving cast members are simply sitting together on couches, watching old sketches and reacting to them. That hangout energy is infectious. You get to see the performers remember how a joke came together, laugh at each other’s old choices, and reconnect with the strange chemistry that made the original show work. I found those scenes much more entertaining than the conventional talking-head history of SCTV’s rise and legacy.
There is something especially moving about watching Catherine O’Hara in this footage now. She was one of the show’s defining performers, and her death earlier this year gives the reunion an unexpected emotional weight. The documentary does not need to overstate that sadness. Just seeing O’Hara laughing with her old collaborators is enough to make the film feel like a record of a world that is no longer fully available to us.
My main criticism is that the movie does not always know where its most valuable material is. It spends a fair amount of time explaining the history of SCTV, but comedy fans will probably be more interested in the creative process, the individual sketches, and the relationships between the performers. The reunion scenes suggest a more exciting documentary hiding inside this one, one that would have stayed longer with the people who made the show instead of moving so quickly through the broader institutional history.
Still, if you are already a fan of SCTV, this is clearly made for you. It is a valuable reminder that some of the most influential comedy of the last fifty years came from a small Canadian troupe that happened to contain an absurd number of future legends. SCTV: The Greatest Show You’ve Never Heard Of is not perfect, but the people at its center are too talented and the history is too important for the film to be anything less than worthwhile.
I give SCTV: The Greatest Show You’ve Never Heard Of a B.
