Only on Canadian TV, specifically CBC, could a quirky little series like Twitch City ever be made. And only on CBC could a bout of programming amnesia result in viewers never getting the opportunity to see the entire 13-episode series.

Now here's your chance. It begins re-airing starting tonight at 9 p.m. on CBC.

Don McKellar, who created and wrote most of the sitcom, stars as the curious, agoraphobic Curtis, who has retreated to a few rooms in the Kensignton Market home he owns. Inside his retreat he plays videos and gorges on junk food while watching talk and game shows around the clock.

Molly Parker plays his comically twisted girlfriend, Hope (it should be Hopeless). She attends to Curtis's needs from sex to dinner and in her own way is just as mixed up as her boyfriend.

The show is about the effects TV has on most of us. Maybe we haven't deteriorated to Curtis's level, but give us time.

The first batch of six episodes were shot in the winter of 1997. I remember how cold and damp the studio, a renovated factory near Gooderham and Worts, seemed even under the blazing TV lights. There was a year's wait until the series debuted - only to the pre-empted by the Atlanta Olympics.

Then there was another year's wait until cash-strapped CBC ordered seven more episodes and they ran in March, 2000. And after another year, the whole of Twitch City is on. Younger people who actually caught the shows were the most enthusiastic. Those who had grown up watching TV realized the addictive influences of the medium.

But this looks like it for the struggling sitcom. During one break McKellar starred in and directed the promising comedy Last Night. It might have been more ambitious than Twitch City, but it wasn't half as much fun. Parker has gone on to a string of movies including Sunshine (she'd already completed Kissed). Getting them back together would probably impossible - and the rest of the cast including Daniel McIvor, Callum Keith Rennie and Kenneth Welsh, is just as busy.

Most of the cast had known each other before, hence their chumminess on screen. Parker was chosen by director Bruce McDonald, who had directed her on TV's Lonesome Dove. She'd worked with Rennie previously and later made the movie Suspicious River with him. Rennie had acted in McDonald's movie Hard Core Logo and subsequently made Last Night for McKellar. Then he co-starred with McKellar in eXistenZ.

McKellar first envisioned Twitch City as a movie, and indeed the first six episodes have a beginning, middle and end. The next batch were looser and funnier. And darker: Curtis had become manipulative and was regressing even more. In one scene he has to eat his breakfast like a dog. In another story he has an aged social worker wonderfully read to him while he's in bed faking a major illness.

And Hope? The way she dressed in ugly girlish attire is strange enough. Her succession of awful jobs shows just how far she's willing to go to support Curtis. A lot of her problems are explained by the appearance of her domineering father (Welsh).

The fact that 13 episodes got made is a triumph for the Canadian TV system. It's just that viewers who dug Curtis's world may wonder if the guy is still sitting in his shabby living room watching the latest spate of crummy talk shows.

© Toronto Star