Tuning In

Thompson’s ’Kids’ stuff

Comedian Scott Thompson knew he’d found his sketch comedy “family” when his fellow “Kids in the Hall” didn’t mind spilling a drop or two of blood during practice.

But that wasn’t the case during his college days at York University in Toronto.

“I was thrown out of the acting program,” Mr. Thompson says. “I was seen as a problem. I couldn’t control my energy, and I injured people in improv.”

That changed when he eventually fell in with a group of aspiring comics — Mark McKinney, Dave Foley, Bruce McCulloch and Kevin McDonald — who welcomed that energy.

“They didn’t mind me hurting them onstage. That’s when I knew I found a home,” he says of the merger that eventually yielded “The Kids in the Hall,” the offbeat sketch-comedy show that carved its niche in TV from 1989 through 1994.

That zany brand of energy can be rediscovered anew with today’s DVD release of the show’s first season in a four-disc set.

The package, priced at $59.95, contains 20 episodes, new interviews with the quintet, rare pilot-episode sketches and other fresh extras. Fans who helped shape the boxed set’s content via online polls specifically asked for the early footage from the Kids’ days at the Rivoli Theater in Toronto.

Looking back, the show’s material baffles. With its unwillingness to bow to sitcom-style timing and unconventional humor — including its all-male troupe routinely working in drag to flesh out the female roles —”Kids” was never an easy sell.

Yet its humor has remained intact over the years, because its sketches aren’t rooted in any time or place. By contrast, the recent boxed-set release of “In Living Color,” which made its TV debut around the same time as “Kids,” features dated bits based on current events of the late ’80s and early ’90s.

“We didn’t do celebrity impressions. We didn’t parody. We tried to make things universal and not be part of a time,” recalls Mr. Thompson, whose career continued after “Kids” with a role on HBO’s celebrated comedy “The Larry Sanders Show.”

Looking back, he winces when he watches the sketches today.

“Why did they keep me?” Mr. Thompson asks, in full self-deprecation mode.

Hip-hop props

After years of appealing squarely to the baby-boomer crowd, VH1 is trying to get some street cred.

The network will show some love to hip-hop’s pioneers with a new awards show set to air on the cable network later this year, VH1’s president told the Associated Press.

Though it has recently broadened its focus to pop culture and has profiled rappers such as Snoop Dogg and Tupac Shakur, VH1 has hardly been synonymous with hip-hop over the years.

But network president Christina Norman says VH1 is the perfect venue for such an awards show, which will be an annual event.

“The people who grew up listening to the Sugar Hill Gang and Run-DMC, those are our viewers,” Miss Norman told the AP.

“VH1 Hip-Hop Honors,” scheduled for Oct. 8, will honor groundbreaking artists with a show mixing old-school and current rap performers.

Although other awards shows celebrate rap, including the Source Awards and the BET Awards, Miss Norman says VH1’s program will provide an opportunity to laud veteran rappers who may not have received accolades in the past.

It also will cash in on the glut of awards shows blanketing the media in recent years.

Miss Norman says hip-hop often gets overlooked, noting that the first rap Grammy wasn’t awarded until 1989 — though hip-hop had been around for at least a decade before that.

Hired again?

“Apprentice” winner Bill Rancic might have to ask his new boss if he can moonlight on a new TV show.

There’s talk at NBC of mounting a spinoff of sorts to the Donald Trump-hosted hit, which would follow Mr. Rancic over the next year as he oversees the construction of a 90-story Trump International Hotel and Tower in his native Chicago, Reuters News Agency reports.

Sources stressed, however, that the discussions are in the early idea stage and that no formal deals are in place. But “Apprentice” creator and executive producer Mark Burnett says a follow-up series on Mr. Rancic “seems like a fairly obvious choice.”

Mr. Burnett wouldn’t elaborate on specific plans but did hint that Mr. Rancic might even be persuaded to hire some of the contestants from “The Apprentice” — even show villainess Omarosa Manigault-Stallworth — to work on the construction project.

Let’s hope she wears her hard hat on the construction site.

Mr. Rancic has his work cut out for him with his Trump project, with or without a TV-show add-on.

According to published reports, the $700 million project is facing an uphill climb in securing final approvals from city officials.

Compiled by Christian Toto from staff and wire reports.