Before Kenan Thompson became the longest-tenured Saturday Night Live cast member, he was getting his start on Nickelodeon by way of All That and Kenan & Kel, which also happens to be how his longtime friendship with Kel Mitchell began. The two went on to co-star in Good Burger, based on the All That sketch of the same name, and for a long time seemed inseparable. But after trying to pitch a Kenan & Kel spinoff, and with only one of their SNL auditions being successful, they just... stopped working together.
Kenan & Kel ran for four seasons, from 1996 to 2001, but the duo wanted to take it farther. While appearing on Deon Cole’s Funny Knowing You podcast, the SNL star looked back at his career, including his experience on Kenan & Kel and what came after. He revealed that there was a time that he and Mitchell were going around and pitching a spinoff of the beloved sitcom:
We were trying to figure out like, are we going to do like Kenan & Kel: The College Years. We were trying to pitch that to like The WB and shit like that. And it just never really got the bites that we really wanted.
It would have been fun to get a college-set spinoff of the beloved Nickelodeon classic following Kenan and Kel in the later years, and seeing what kind of hijinks they’d get into. But it makes sense why it didn’t get picked up, as Thompson and Mitchell were getting older and trying to make a Nickelodeon show into, probably, an adult comedy would have been hard. What’s even harder is the fact that they basically came as a packaged duo, and once the spinoff didn’t move forward, they just wanted to go off and do their own things:
We also were getting to that point where it’s like, ‘I think we need to establish that there’s a Kenan Thompson and a Kel Mitchell.’ A lot of people were Kenan & Kel-ing us to death a little bit. [Kel] went and did Mystery Men. I don’t know if people supported — it’s a cult classic now. But I don’t know if our people went and supported, because it was him doing something by himself. And then when I would do something kind of by myself, you know, it was not as overall the same kind of buzz we had when did shit in our world. Maybe we need to work on our own, little things.
Thompson and Mitchell worked together for over half a decade, and they were pretty synonymous with each other. So it only made sense they’d want to go off and do their own things once the spinoff wasn’t picked up, even if it did take some time. When asked if they had purposely avoided each other, Thompson revealed that was not the case. They just drifted apart and were both busy, personally and professionally:
No, it wasn’t on purpose. He just got into his life, like he had kids…. He had kids young, so he just went into fatherhood basically. And I was just running around just trying to figure it out.
Luckily, in recent years, things had changed. They started hanging out more and doing projects together, such as the All That revival, Good Burger 2, and Mitchell even made a surprise cameo on SNL in 2022 when Keke Palmer was hosting during a sketch in which Palmer and Thompson make a reboot of Kenan & Kel titled Kenan & Kelly.
I can imagine how hard it was for Thomson and Mitchell to branch off and do their own things, but it definitely was needed. Mitchell was able to focus on his family and other work, while Thompson was able to focus on the next step in his career, Saturday Night Live. And at the very least, they are as close as ever today, so that time away from each other definitely seemed to have helped.
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