A very “Murray Christmas” is happening soon on TV, with Bill Murray singing and Sofia Coppola directing

Christmas is coming early this year, and it hasn’t even arrived just yet.

We learned today, first via Variety, that Bill Murray — who has sung on Saturday Night Live and in various movie and TV appearances over the past few decades (including his newest film, St. Vincent, wherein he sings “Shelter From the Storm” over the closing credits) — will star in and sing classic Christmas carols for an upcoming holiday TV special directed by Sofia Coppola, who also directed Murray in his Oscar-nominated performance for Lost in Translation.

“It’s not going to be live,” Murray told Variety. “We’re going to do it like a little movie. It won’t have a format, but it’s going to have music. It will have texture. It will have threads through it that are writing. There will be prose.”

Coppola confirmed the collaboration, adding: “Not sure when it will air, but my motivation is to hear him singing my song requests.”

Since Murray famously ad-libbed the theme to Star Wars on SNL, perhaps a deep cut from the infamous Star Wars Christmas special?

Before we knew him, we could hear Bill Murray sing “Kung Fu Christmas” for the National Lampoon Radio Hour in 1974.

Ten years later, he tip-toed toward Santa Claus briefly in this scene from Ghostbusters.

And, of course, there was Scrooged, which found Murray’s TV network executive putting a contemporary spin on Dickens and A Christmas Carol, declaring he’d seen the light of the Christmas miracle!

Sean L. McCarthy

Editor and publisher since 2007, when he was named New York's Funniest Reporter. Former newspaper reporter at the New York Daily News, Boston Herald and smaller dailies and community papers across America. Loves comedy so much he founded this site.

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