FOR TWO or three disorienting minutes - a long time for TV viewers to be bewildered - you think a CBC technician has pushed in the wrong tape.

This can't be Twitch City, an offbeat situation comedy series which returns to CBC March 15 for only seven more episodes. But it is.

Right off the top, before the opening credits, a menacing male face framed by dreadlocks fills the screen, spewing a stream of jagged hip-hop language and repeatedly using a four-letter word not allowed on conventional prime-time TV.

The camera pulls back. The man is in a jail cell bunk and standing below him is Nathan (actor Daniel MacIvor), who, in one of the show's first six episodes, was jailed for killing a homeless man in Toronto's Kensington Market where Twitch City takes place.

The homeless man was played by Al Waxman, who went along with the symbolic joke of a younger TV generation killing the actor still widely known as the King of Kensington.

The first episode of Twitch City's second season is also a tongue-in-cheek tribute to the sizzling U.S. cable prison series, Oz, which features a hip-hop talking narrator.

Nathan interrupts the cameo actor spouting the profanity, scolds his lousy attempt at poetry, hands him a copy of Leonard Cohen poems and tells him to learn from it.

Always on the edge in his bare-budget movies such as Highway 61 and Hard Core Logo, Twitch City director Bruce McDonald is playful working in TV.

Later in the first episode, he imaginatively frames a conversation between Nathan and a prison staffer (actor Allegra Fulton).

Instead of having them sitting across a desk, McDonald intercuts shots of Nathan on the bottom left side of the screen with action going on behind him with shots of Fulton on the bottom right side of the screen and fronting a glass wall. "It gives the scene a raw edge," McDonald notes.

Following the style of Oz's unorthodox camera angles and bare-it-all scenes, McDonald shows naked male prisoners and a bare-bottomed man being painfully tattooed with a cigar. He also employs some burly biker friends to play non-speaking prisoners.

And Don McKellar, the show's star, creator and co-writer with Bob Martin, keeps his lead character mostly out of the action in the first episode. Curtis, the neurotic apartment landlord, spends most of his time watching TV, but never goes outside.

In another episode, McDonald has fun with Jennifer Jason Leigh, who appeared with McKellar in David Cronenberg's movie, eXistenZ and agreed to be on Twitch City in a role McKellar created for her.

She plays an obsessive researcher who wants to study Curtis and, it's revealed, to become romantically involved with him, to the annoyance of his live-in lover played, as last season, by Molly Parker.

Jason Leigh's role mocks the character she played in the movie Single White Female.

Adding irony to the idea of a U.S. actor guesting on CBC, McDonald ensured that, in some scenes, Leigh wore a black T-shirt with a CBC logo, on which the camera focuses repeatedly.

Grateful that CBC-TV is an incubator for offbeat shows such as Twitch City ("a brave step for them"), McDonald blasts senior network programmers for scheduling the first six episodes around its Olympics coverage in 1998 and for repeating them last fall rather than as a lead-in to the coming seven that end the series.

"To me, it's idiotic programming," says McDonald, "but they claim they have some master plan. I'm disappointed.

"At least the show (co-produced by Accent Entertainment and McDonald's company, Shadow Shows) has been sold to Australia, the U.S. and several other countries, and we're going to put all 13 on home video."

This time, CBC will run Twitch City weekly and uninterrupted (as critics thundered it should have for the first six episodes): March 15 at 9 p.m., and back-to-back episodes on March 22, March 29 and April 9.

McDonald recently directed his first TV commercial (for Levis) and collaborated on a science-fiction, post-nuclear era storyline.

Enjoyable as it is for McDonald to work in TV (and now behind a 30-second spot), he hasn't made a feature film in four years and says, "I'm going to blow my brains if I don't make a movie soon."

After a project aborted last year, he hopes to make a feature this summer based on one chapter in a praised debut 1998 novel, Pontypool Changes Everything by Ontario resident Tony Burgess.

It's about zombies that attack and the spread of a language virus - "scary," adds McDonald with a laugh.

© Toronto Star