Seven years is a long time to nurse a hangover, but Drunk History is finally sobering up enough to come back. Comedy Central announced three new short-form episodes of the Emmy-winning series, its first fresh installments since the show quietly disappeared after a 2019 renewal got reversed when the pandemic shut production down.

The format hasn't changed. Get someone properly drunk, put a microphone in front of them, let them narrate a slice of history, and have a cast of comedians lip-sync the whole thing as a reenactment. The facts stay true. The slurring, the tangents, the occasional dramatic pause to burp, those don't.

Episode one drops September 15 on Comedy Central's YouTube channel and it's a big one for pop culture nerds: Meghan Trainor plays Madonna, recounting her performance of 'Like a Virgin' at the very first MTV Video Music Awards. The other two episodes cover Frances Perkins, the labor secretary usually left out of the FDR highlight reel despite architecting the New Deal, and a genuinely unhinged one about two men who spent their lives trying to build the world's largest ball of twine.

The cast list reads like a Comedy Central reunion. Steve Agee, Tim Baltz, Seth Green, Colin Hanks, Jack McBrayer, Chris Parnell, Johnny Pemberton, Daryl Sabara, Mae Whitman and Weird Al Yankovic are all in it, with Lisa Gilroy, Patton Oswalt and Marisha Ray handling narration duties.

From a bar story to a franchise

Drunk History has an origin story almost as good as anything it's ever reenacted. Creator Derek Waters, according to Deadline, first got the idea in 2007 when an intoxicated Jake Johnson told him about Otis Redding's 1967 plane crash. Waters and Jeremy Konner turned that into a five-minute short about the Burr-Hamilton duel, starring Johnson and Michael Cera, and it went viral enough to become a Funny or Die series before Comedy Central picked it up in 2013.

Six seasons and 70 episodes later, the show had racked up 17 Emmy nominations, a costume win in 2015, and spinoffs in Australia, Mexico and the UK. Waters told Deadline he'd been talking to Comedy Central's Ari Pearce "for a while" about bringing it back in some form.

"Drunk History has and will always be about informing the audience of History we may not have heard of but should have," Waters said, per Deadline. "We hope these new stories do both for our long awaited audience."

Pearce, who heads Comedy Central's original content, called the revival part of a bigger push. "As we continue to expand our reach across platforms, Drunk History is a great example of how we're delivering Comedy Central to fans in new ways," she said.

Whether three episodes turns into a full season is anyone's guess right now. Deadline reported that this drop follows Comedy Central Stand-Up Selects, another new digital series, and that the network is eyeing a broader slate of podcasts and specials post the Paramount-Skydance merger. For now, mark September 15 and hope Madonna's VMA moment survives the retelling intact.