Heavy promises, light delivery from former Kid in the Hall

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It’s an attention-grabbing title, without a doubt, so it would be a real letdown if it turns out to be only one-third true.

Kids in the Hall alumnus Bruce McCulloch returns to prime-time TV this week in a new sitcom, Young Drunk Punk, that purports to be loosely based on his late-teen misadventures growing up in Calgary.

McCulloch has written about his difficult upbringing, most notably in an autobiographical collection of essays titled Let’s Start a Riot: How a Young Drunk Punk Became a Hollywood Dad, but the young characters he has created as the anchors of this new series (which premières Wednesday at 7:30 p.m. on Citytv) don’t quite live up to the anarchist attitude suggested by the title.

They’re young, all right, but in the two episodes provided for preview, they’re neither drunk nor particularly punk-ish. Instead, they’re mostly nerdy, almost hopelessly needy and desperate to be accepted as the edgy sort of outcasts who would necessarily reject the notion of seeking acceptance.

Ian McKay (Tim Carlson) is the central figure, clearly the guy most directly inspired by McCulloch’s post-adolescent antics. He’s a decidedly middle-class kid, whose dad, Lloyd (McCulloch, complete with creepy ’80s moustache) is a control-freakish maintenance supervisor at a townhouse development, and whose mom, Helen (McCulloch’s real-life wife, Tracy Ryan) is a homemaker who works part-time at Woolco.

Ian and best pal Shinky (Atticus Mitchell) view themselves as rebellious outsiders, mostly because their musical tastes run more toward the alternative (Buzzcocks T-shirts and posters are prominently on display in the series pilot) than the mainstream. They think the world can be changed by a song, and would very much like to be the ones who choose which song is the catalyst for that change.

Wednesday’s opener focuses mostly on the consequences of the pair’s plan to hijack their school’s Class of 1980 graduation so they can blow their schoomates’ minds by replacing the valedictorian address with a punk-rock song.

The prank goes horribly awry, of course, and the school’s principal withholds their diplomas; this forces Ian to concoct a cover story when he arrives home to a surprise graduation party his parents have organized.

The ruse works, at least temporarily, but it doesn’t solve the bigger problem Ian is facing, which is figuring out what he’s going to do with the rest of his life. Topping the list are getting a job (Lloyd already has a Brae Vista crew shirt with his name on it) and moving out on his own (and, in Ian’s latest plan, in with older sister Belinda, an idea that dies quickly when she announces she’s split with her cowboy boyfriend and is moving back home).

It’s mildly entertaining, thanks mostly to the retro atmosphere and McCulloch’s quirky performance as Lloyd, a guy who believes he’s got it made because he’s the one with the keys to the supervisor’s park-patrol golf cart.

But Young Drunk Punk never offers anything as edgy or subversive as its title implies, and most of the time it feels like a McCulloch-penned Kids in the Hall sketch that’s been allowed to run too long. The second episode, which follows Ian and Shinky as they flirt with their first real-world jobs, actually loses some of the modest momentum created by the première.

It isn’t a bad show, and it’s possible that some viewers will like it a lot. But in the same way it fails to deliver on its title’s promise, Young Drunk Punk disappoints because this story about when McCulloch was a kid doesn’t live up to the TV-comedy standard set when he was a Kid.

brad.oswald@freepress.mb.ca Twitter: @BradOswald