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Kenan Thompson has been a mainstay in network comedy since he was a child. Appearing in classics like All That, Kenan and Kel, all the way through his tenure at Saturday Night Live, Kenan Thompson seems like he was born for sketch comedy. Though after thousands of sketches, and a few feature films, Kenan Thompson attempted to branch out with his own sitcom titled simply "Kenan". But as short lived as it was, the mystery remains, how exactly did this comedy powerhouse fail at bringing a sitcom to life? What went wrong?
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I do not blame them for canceling us. Oh, I can show y'all a blooper reel sometime
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A veteran sketch comic performer iconic to generations of fans from his years on Nickelodeon
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and Saturday Night Live, Kenan Thompson waited a long time to get a shot at starring in his own
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network television series. But despite all the goodwill he had built up with audiences
0:18
and all the past success SNL's cast has when it comes to launching their own shows
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Kenan's sitcom wiped out. Apparently audiences didn't think it was all that
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I don't want to talk about my past. I mean, I don't want to talk about my repast
0:33
because repast means food, and I don't want to talk about it, I just want to eat it, y'all
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Keenan Thompson started taking acting lessons at the age of five. By the time he was 16
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he was one of the breakout stars of Nickelodeon's sketch comedy show All That
0:46
where he became known for his big smile and goofy high-energy comic delivery
0:50
It's Superdude! That's right! I'm Superdude, the teenage superhero with powers that make women sweat
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It's true! Higher-ups took note, and just two years later, he became one of the eponymous co-stars of
1:04
Kenan and Kel, which ran for four seasons. His television success would also land him in a few
1:09
movies, like two of the Mighty Ducks sequels and the all-that spinoff movie, Good Burger
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Welcome to Good Burger, home of the Good Burger. Can I take your order
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But it was in 2003 that Thompson got the gig he would come to call his forever plan
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when he joined the cast of Saturday Night Live as a featured player. Oh my god, are you guys the new dudes
1:28
What's your name? Like I care. No one could have known it at the time
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but Thompson's residency on the iconic sketch comedy show would basically be permanent
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He would go on to become SNL's longest tenured cast member, break the series record for the most number of celebrity impressions
1:45
and as of this writing, he's still part of the ensemble. What up, what up, what up
1:50
Welcome to Black Jeopardy, the only TV game show where the audience is in church clothes
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Nonetheless it would take him up until 2021 to finally get a starring role in his own scripted network sitcom On the show simply titled Kenan Thompson played Kenan Williams a widowed father raising two young daughters with the help of his brother Gary played by Thompson fellow SNL co Chris Redd and his father Rick played by Don Johnson Kenan Williams is
2:14
a former actor who married the actress that, despite only being three years his senior
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played his mother on his show. That's just nasty. I know. That's what all the fans thought too, but it's not like we were really related
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and we were only three years apart, but I got the baby face. Now the host of a local Atlanta television morning show called Wake Up With Keenan
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he struggles to be a good father to his kids while dealing emotionally with the loss of his spouse
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which occurred about a year before the series began. Clearly inspired by laugh track enhanced multicam family sitcoms of the 1980s and 90s
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like The Cosby Show, A Different World, and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Keenan aimed to, in his own words
2:50
show young black fathers in a positive light, while putting a new twist on the uplifting father figure kind of show
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And indeed, the series did try to do some things differently than its predecessors
3:00
like using a single cam format and ditching the old-fashioned laugh track
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but the new twist mainly turned out to be a more realistic take on its main character's struggle with grief
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I'm fine. You are not fine, man, because you're doing that thing with your nose with one nostril that's flares by itself
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Really? Yeah. Which one? The one that's flaring. Reviews for the show were fair to positive right from the start
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and between live viewing and DVR, over 5 million people watched the pilot
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which was considered strong for a new network series in 2021. But those numbers fell off fast, and by the end of season one
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Keenan was pulling in an audience less than half the size of the pilot. The second season didn't do any better
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and what would turn out to be the series finale drew in only a million and a half total viewers
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After just 20 episodes over two seasons, Keenan was canceled in May of 2022
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I know the streets say no snitching in the hip-hop community, but I gotta take this to Yelp. People need to know
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And Keenan did manage to snag himself an Emmy nomination for a standing lead actor in a comedy series in 2021
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But compared to the massive TV success found by so many of his SNL cohorts when they went solo it hard to look at Keenan show as anything other than a failure Tina Fey and Tracy Morgan for example got seven seasons out of the wildly popular 30 Rock
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And Amy Poehler equaled that run with the critically beloved Parks and Recreation
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Andy Samberg starred for eight seasons on Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and Will Forte had a four-season run with The Last Man on Earth
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And while it's true those shows were slightly older and likely benefited from airing in a different era of television
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Bill Hader's Barry and Jason Sudeikis' Ted Lasso are contemporary series that broke through in a big way while Kenan was floundering
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In fact, the level of adoration the latter two shows received only draws attention to how little Kenan series ever really registered on the greater pop culture radar
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So what went wrong? Whereas shows like Barry and Ted Lasso took their respective formats in bold and fresh new directions
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Kenan was a little too similar to the 80s and 90s shows it drew from
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And as a result, it felt old-fashioned. For a show that set out to put a new twist on its genre, it didn't nearly feel new enough
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And what it did do differently than its TV ancestors, delving into its hero's grief in a way
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a show like Full House would never have, it didn't do all that well. Handling dark subject matters is
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by no means a stumbling block on comic success. Shows like Barry and BoJack Horseman have proven
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that television can get big laughs from heavy subjects. But unlike those series, Keenan never
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embrace the idea of being a dark comedy. It was just a generic family sitcom with a lot of
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depressing moments, and that kept it from ever being all that funny. My dad got sad. He'd drink and swear and then disappear for three days
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That's disturbing. Or is it the coolest thing you ever heard? These problems are likely the result of a tortured development process. Though the initial idea for
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a show centered on a dad and his family seems to have been Thompson's, Kenan himself isn't much of
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of a TV writer, having only one co-writing credit, an episode of all that, to his name
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As such, he turned to Superstore head writer Jackie Clark to draft the pilot of what was originally
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called Saving Larry. Shortly thereafter, former SNL star Chris Rock took over as executive producer and director
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for the pilot which likely to cash in on its star name was retitled Saving Keenan But after Keenan and the producers had a chance to live with the material for a while the show was retooled so they could according to him flesh out the world a little more
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The end result of all these creative hands in the process was a bland show with a boring premise
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I knew it, crack. Pay up, losers. The final product felt forced and calculated
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and despite the fact it all started with a genuine creative spark from Keenan himself
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It lacked any sense of an authentic creator voice. And one Keenan might be especially vulnerable to, since unlike many of his SNL castmates
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he exclusively relies on other creatives to write for him. But even given all that, it's hard not to think the problem was something much more basic
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Namely, that even if its execution had been stellar, a depressing, introspective series about a man coping with grief
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just isn't really what Keenan fans want from him. I thought, you know, I would handle it the way I always do, which is to not
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But that didn't work. Don't get us wrong. It's commendable he wanted to stretch himself as a performer, and he didn't do a bad job
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But from a guy the world mainly loves for his ability to deliver lighthearted silliness
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the material just might not have been the best match. The most telling fact could be that while he was originally expected to depart SNL
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after his 18th season to work on Kenan, Thompson instead announced that, unlike most cast members to get their own show
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he would continue to appear on the iconic sketch comedy series. Considering how things worked out, it seems like a safe bet that even the star of the show
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had his doubts about whether Kenan the series was good enough to go the distance
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I don't know if and when I'll ever leave SNL kind of thing because..
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21 years, they should rename that part of Fifth Avenue Kenan Thompson. How cool would that be
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But given how long he's been making us all laugh, it's hard not to feel like Kenan Thompson deserved better than being shoehorned
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into a needlessly depressing take on a stale format. For now, he's still on his forever plan at Saturday Night Live
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but given his recent comments about how he thinks the show should end after its forthcoming 50th season
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we'd like to imagine that maybe he's eyeing another stab at his own series
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