How Twitch City defied every trapping of mainstream TV.
SOME 20 YEARS LATER, TWITCH CITY IS A REMINDER OF WHAT CANADIAN TV LACKS
Just about 20 years ago, the CBC inconspicuously broadcast the pilot episode of what remains, two decades later, perhaps the finest program in Canadian television history. It was called Twitch City, and with near- miraculous daring it defied every trapping and convention of mainstream TV. Conceived by Don McKellar, who stars, in collaboration with Bruce McDonald, who directs, the series was, broadly speaking, an “anti- sitcom” — a misanthropic comedy that seemed actively hostile to the form.
Into the vacuous nullity of cathode- ray oblivion the show blankly stared. What it saw was sobering. What it saw was us.
Seinfeld, famously, was “a show about nothing.” Twitch City was about less than that. Its nominal hero is an agoraphobic thirty- something couch potato named Curtis, played with dry wit and bone- deep torpor by McKellar.
Curtis is addicted to TV. By this I don’t mean simply that he watches a lot of television. I mean he craves its nourishi ng glow. Channel- s urfing, more than food or oxygen, sustains him. He does little else throughout the show other than watch other shows — soap operas and infomercials, cooking programs and workout videos. Best of all he likes Rex Reilly, a tabloid talk show in the spirit of Geraldo and Jerry Springer. In such highbrow symposiums of thought as “I Slept With My Mother” and “I’m Fat and I’m Proud,” we find a barren culture barrelling toward its intellectual nadir. Curtis has seen every episode twice.
He also has a roommate, with whom he shares his two- storey Victorian apartment on the north end of Augusta Avenue i n Kensington Market. ( The apartment is still there today, incidentally, right above the record store Paradise Bound be- side Lucky Money restaurant.) Nathan, played with fey illtemper by Daniel MacIvor, is a fastidious domestic tyrant who can’t abide his companion’s life of sloth and squalor, and initially the show seems poised to be a Gen-X spin on The Odd Couple. But by the end of the first episode, Nathan is in jail, owing to the accidental murder of a pestering vagrant — a twist of fate that lands his girlfriend Hope, played by the great Molly Parker, in the house taking Nathan’s place.
Curtis and Hope endeavour to keep the home together in the erstwhile patriarch’s ab- sence. They welcome replacement roommates — deranged cat ladies, studious bookworms, once a shipment of mysterious cookies with a benefactor paying the rent — and field calls from Nathan ever- irritated on the inside.
And of course they fall in love: the self- styled loser and the gorgeous ingenue are a natural onscreen pairing.
Rex Reilly, meanwhile, continues to interrogate freaks and weirdos on the tube, and even a burgeoning romance can’t keep Curtis from tuning in. Around him gather zany characters and outrageous scenarios, bumbling hitmen and flamboyant neoNazis. As he remains glued to the set, Curtis’s own life begins to look a lot like TV.
The first thing that strikes you about Twitch City is how unlike other half- hour comedies it is. And that’s what strikes you when you watch Twitch City in 2017: it’s hard to comprehend what it would have looked like 20 years ago, programmed adjacent to Everybody Loves Raymond and Friends.
Nobody loves Curtis. Curtis doesn’t have any friends. A decade before the ascent of the dramatic anti- hero ( all those Walter Whites and Don Drapers, with whom Curtis shares a great deal), and even longer before the anti-comedy prevailed as the norm ( Tim and Eric is a clear successor of the style), Twitch City was delighting and bewildering its ( rather paltry) audience in equal measure.
It achieved all of this — it challenged viewers, confounded expectations, disrupted a popular form — on the CBC. In other words a radical work of comic invention was transmitted across Canada under the aegis of the country’s national broadcaster. Hardly anybody watched it, and its two slim seasons — just six 30- minute episodes apiece — were divided by an interminable, and one would have assumed at the time to be permanent, twoyear hiatus. ( The series concluded unceremoniously on April 5, 2000, launched into the millennium it belonged with in attitude from the start.)
But that it made it to air in the first place is fairly astonishing. There was never anything like Twitch City in Canada. There hasn’t been since, and there may never be again.
“Is it funny that a Canadian should be asked to compile an anthology of funny prose?” asked Martin Amis, mordantly, ina review of the Mordecai Richler- edited Best of Modern Humour. “‘ The Cream of Canadian Humour’, after all, is a regular contender in those jocose short-book competition s—along with‘ Australian Etiquette,’ ‘ Italian War Heroes,’ and so on.” It would of course be humourless to take offence at such a barb. And yet it does seem pretty clear, doesn’t it, looking down the list? Norm Macdonald is Canadian. Seth Rogen is Canadian. Nathan Fielder is Canadian. Catherine O’Hara is Canadian — I doublechecked. This country, one must admit, has produced a formidable body of comic luminaries.
Comic luminaries, yes: but comedies? The field is conspicuously meagre. Kids in the Hall remains of course unimpeachable. Nirvanna the Band the Show, as I’ve declared before, is wonderfully original and consistently uproarious. Nathan for You is the funniest ( and often smartest) thing on TV — but it’s not Canadian, even if its Vancouver- born creator is. What feels aberrant most of all about Twitch City looking back is that its comedic genius was so unorthodox.
It did not remotely feel, as contemporary CBC comedies so often do, like the product of conservative workshopping and overtures to universal appeal.
Twitch City wouldn’t have survived a focus group. It was never going to endear itself to Canadians on the scale of Corner Gas or Mr D—low est-commondenominator drivel, anathema to humour. What we see in such shows is sobering. What we see is us.
A RADICAL WORK OF COMIC INVENTION WAS TRANSMITTED ACROSS CANADA.