'SCTV' Is Finally Coming To Streaming, But Only in Canada
'SCTV' Is Finally Coming To Streaming, But Only in Canada
Keegan KellyMon, February 23, 2026 at 9:00 PM UTC
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Canadian comedians famously hate it when people mistake them for American citizens. I’m sure that, right about now, there are a few funny Canucks up in heaven who are looking down on us Yanks and laughing.
A little over three weeks following the passing of comedy legend Catherine O’Hara, Amazon Prime Video has secured a long-awaited streaming deal that will allow them to carry O’Hara’s first major project.
Second City Television, born out of the Toronto branch of the lauded improvisational theater by the same name, had been in licensing purgatory for the entirety of the streaming revolution, due to the show’s teensy, weensy, totally-not-legal tendency to play the popular music of the 1970s and 1980s mid-scene without bothering to secure licensing rights to the songs.
But on March 3rd, SCTV, which introduced massive, industry-defining stars like O’Hara, John Candy, Harold Ramis, Rick Moranis, Martin Short and more to the greater North American audience, will finally hit streaming on (Canadian) Prime Video.
Us Americans truly can't stop losing with these tariffs.
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SCTV ran sporadically from 1976 to 1984 on several different Canadian television stations, and it showcased sketch comedy inspired from the improv tradition that was similar to the work being done on the fledgling Saturday Night Live at the time. As opposed to SNL – which, of course, is itself a Canadian invention – SCTV featured longer, more thought-out sketches and a distinctly Canadian balance of silliness and outright mockery.
Because SCTV was a collaboration between a bunch of stage comedians who had never made a TV show before, the series was a chaotic, guerilla-style production that regularly ran its budget well above what the networks had expected, which is the driving reason behind its many cross-channel moves. However, the multiple homes of SCTV during its broadcast years have less to do with the show's ongoing unavailability in the United States than the aforementioned licensing issues that would never fly in today's era of automated copyright strikes.
“Here's the deal on the TV shows. Andrew Alexander and the other financial partners would've released the tapes on home video years ago but for a little item they overlooked back in the eighties called ‘clearing music rights,’” SCTV star Dave Thomas explained to fans in the FAQ section of the show's Web 1.0 site, “We were true guerrilla TV in that when we wanted background music we just lifted it from wherever we wanted. Consequently, today, to release the shows on home video, it would cost millions to clear the music.”
It's unclear how, exactly, Prime Video managed to make the SCTV catalog copyright compliant for Canadian streaming. Perhaps Amazon has some especially patriotic and deep-pocketed Canadian comedy fans on its board. Maybe, following O'Hara's passing, the infringed-upon musicians and their estates all collectively decided to cut SCTV some slack.
But however SCTV finally made it to streaming, one thing is clear – America would be absolutely unlivable if not for the existence of the VPN.
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Source: “AOL Entertainment”
