This one is a little obscure, outside of Canada anyway. It deserves to be more widely known. Twitch City only had two brief seasons, in 1998 and 2000. The show centers around Curtis (Don McKellar), a couch potato whose favorite tv show is a sleazy daytime talk show called The Rex Reilly Show. Rex Reilly (Bruce McCulloch in season 1, Mark McKinney in season 2) hosts episodes with titles like “I Slept with My Mother”, “I Look Like Joyce DeWitt” and other low-brow Jerry Springer type topics. Curtis’s roommate Nathan (Daniel MacIvor) is fed up with Curtis and his slacker ways. He asks his girlfriend Hope (Molly Parker) to move in without consulting Curtis.

On the night that Hope moves in, Nathan and Curtis argue over Curtis feeding Lucky (Nathan’s cat) Frooty-Os cereal instead of the cat food that Curtis was supposed to buy. Nathan angrily goes out to buy the cat food himself when he is accosted by a homeless man (Al Waxman). On the way back from the corner market, the homeless man accosts him again and Nathan swings the bag of cat food at the man’s head, killing him instantly. When the cops show up and tell Curtis they’ve arrested Nathan, Curtis immediately puts a “Room For Rent” sign in the window.

That all happens in episode 1. The rest of the series is about Curtis’ maneuvers to get other people to finance his lifestyle. It becomes clear that Curtis isn’t just a slacker, he’s agoraphobic. He never leaves the apartment. He cons Hope into renting a closet for $200/month while he rents out Nathan’s larger bedroom to an assortment of dubious tenants. The show reaches peak surreality in the season 2 episode, “Planet of the Cats”, in which cats (led by Lucky) rule the Earth and humans are their pets. If you only watch one episode of Twitch City, watch that one.

Don McKellar emerged from the Toronto New Wave, a loosely affiliated group of filmmakers. He’s a writer (Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould, The Red Violin) and director (Last Night) as well as an actor. He has appeared in films directed by Atom Egoyan and David Cronenberg. He created Twitch City with director Bruce McDonald with whom he has collaborated on a number of films (Roadkill, Highway 61, This Movie Is Broken).

All 13 episodes of Twitch City can be found on YouTube. It’s not streaming anywhere else. There was a DVD release but it appears to be out of print. Here is the legendary “Planet of the Cats”: