TallBoyz

Bruce McCulloch

Michael Pool
TallBoyz

(L to R) Tim Blair, Guled Abdi, Franco Nguyen and Vance Banzo in TallBoyz

Courtesy of CBC Television
TallBoyz

(L to R) Vance Banzo, Guled Abdi, Tim Blair and Franco Nguyen in TallBoyz

Courtesy of CBC Television
Fill 1
Fill 1
July 15, 2022
In The Mix

Bruce McCulloch's Tall Tales

From TallBoyz to the Kids in the Hall reboot, the showrunner and executive producer stays busy on both sides of the camera. 

Bob Makela

Bruce McCulloch knew he was on to something different with TallBoyz two days into directing the new sketch-comedy series. The veteran director (Schitt's Creek, Trailer Park Boys) and longtime member of The Kids in the Hall asked if the cast minded shooting the end of a scene first. The four TV neophytes, who'd worked primarily on stage up to that point and were unfamiliar with things like eyelines and hitting a mark, were happy to oblige.

"I've been with a lot of people on big shows [where] if you said, 'Hey, can we start with the last beat of the scene?' their heads would explode," says McCulloch, who's directed all twenty-four episodes of the series and is the showrunner and an executive producer.

The Toronto-based sketch-comedy series launched on CBC Television in 2019 and premiered in the U.S. on Fuse earlier this year. The four-man comedy troupe — Vance Banzo, Tim Blair, Guled Abdi and Franco Nguyen — first came to McCulloch's attention when he was speaking to a comedy class at Toronto's Humber College. After the instructor told him Banzo was in a comedy troupe, McCulloch checked out a TallBoyz live performance.

"The moment I saw the first show," he recalls, "I thought, 'These guys have it.' So we went through the process of, 'Hey, let's try to do a TV show.'" When a Workaholics-type series they were developing failed to pan out, McCulloch says he looked at the group and said, "Hey, why don't we do a fucking sketch show?"

"They all lit up and the energy in the room changed," he says, adding that the quartet had ten sketches at the time. "I told them, 'You're gonna need a couple hundred.'"

McCulloch's style of leadership, he says, is "to be very sensitive to lead from behind, especially people with such amazing and fresh voices." He's careful not to throw out original ideas — "It just feels like that's not what I should do." Much of the material comes from the performers' lives, and when something culturally significant comes up in the writers' room, he says, "I just shut the fuck up and listen."

McCulloch himself appears in The Kids in the Hall's new eight-episode run on Prime Video, which dropped in May.

At five-foot-six, he's learned a valuable lesson about dealing with TallBoyz, whose tallest member, Abdi, is six-foot-eight. "I try not to get pictures standing next to them," he quips. 


This article originally appeared in emmy magazine issue #7, 2022, under the title, "Sketch Comedy."

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