Kids in the Hall, from left, Scott Thompson, Dave Foley, Mark McKinney, Bruce McCulloch and Kevin McDonald are shooting an eight-part murder mystery in North Bay, Ont. (Canadian Press)

Fifteen years after The Kids in the Hall aired on CBC Television, the five original members of the Canadian sketch comedy team have reassembled in North Bay, Ont., to shoot an eight-part TV series.

Death Comes to Town will premiere on CBC in January.

The series is about a killing spree in a small town and the trial that follows. It opens with the character of Death, played by Mark McKinney, getting off a Greyhound bus.

"It's our version of comedy… with a whodunit as the engine," Kids co-founder Bruce McCulloch told CBC Radio's cultural affairs program Q from North Bay on Friday.

The troupe's five members — Dave Foley, Kevin McDonald, McCulloch, McKinney and Scott Thompson — reunited at Montreal's Just for Laughs festival in 2007 and toured across North America last year. "We never broke up," McCulloch said. "We just didn't do anything."

The Kids in the Hall ran on CBC from 1988 to 1994, and on two U.S. networks until 1995.

Troupe members came up with new material for the tour. "And we had just enough juice left in the pear that we felt we had to do something" with it, McCulloch said.

"It felt like the passion, as they say in Los Angeles, within the group was to do a little, weird TV series so we could have deeper drawers for weird characters and stories."

McCulloch came up with the idea for the series. Thompson coined the name Shockton, the small town in which the murder mystery is set. And all five Kids co-wrote the show.

Even though the Kids have been working on individual projects in recent years, McCulloch said the troupe's style has not significantly changed "in terms of what we like. And we all know what each other is going to say in terms of a point of view on a comedy moment. But it's interesting to come back with our different ideas and even the different phrases that we've learned and use."

And although most of them are now based in the United States, he contends the group is even more uniquely Canadian than ever. "But I don't think we ever really made fun of Canadians," he said.

His character is a 600-pound former hockey star; wearing the fat suit required for the part can be physically daunting, McCulloch said. "When you get into the suit, you realize it isn't as funny as you thought."

Now that they are in sync again, fans may see more of the Kids. "We're setting ourselves up to do something every so often," McCulloch said.