The first season of Twitch City, the now-legendary CBC series set in Toronto’s Kensington Market, always stood out for its depiction of some specific locale – the interior of Curtis’ apartment, or a snowy market exterior – that I knew I could never know other than through this show. That’s how specific the show’s creators Don McKellar and Bruce McDonald were in their portraits of a particular place and culture, and how successful they were in collaborating with a dream cast and crew to realize and advance their ideas.
The first season is suffused with wintry exteriors that could be partly to blame for Curtis’ seclusion. (Canadians, after all, are known to be good at hibernating and watching lots of TV in the winter months.) As we grow to know Curtis and the characters circling around his life, we realize the situation is different, of course – it’s a swirling cavalcade of the bizarre, the neurotic, the forlorn and the absurd, resulting in one of the most original sitcoms ever made. McKellar’s approach of essentially treating each season as a feature film was an early exploration of serialized TV, and makes watching each season consecutively a unique long-form narrative experience.
Bruce McDonald’s work here is some of his most inspired, straight through the complete design of the production, and notably in his collaboration with DOP Danny Novak. Some of the Welles-inspired alternative and extreme low angle shots give a unique depth to the tiny apartment, as the set cuts together flawlessly with the actual Kensington apartment exteriors. Novak’s cinematography, and the decision to shoot on 16mm, give the series a consistent un-TV like feel, while the Rex Reilly show within the show is, of course, a traditional TV talkshow. Bob Wiseman’s bold musical accompaniment and a host of completely wicked sound effects (for cues like flipping a remote) are further examples of Twitch City’s dedication to subverting the craft of TV in every department.
With all the recent talk about a potential new talkies movement in American underground cinema, and with mainstream television narratives having evolved to a new level of complexity (if not sophistication), it’s well worth re-visiting Twitch City – and the work of its creators – to appreciate it’s carefully choreographed pauses and snap-back dialogue. But more than anything, it’s the show’s spatial context, as a part of Toronto at a specific time rendered in the guise of a sitcom, that provides a good reminder of the power Toronto neighbourhoods can legitimately espouse in cinema, television, and future visual culture.
Check out a free tour of modern day Kensington Market with Don McKellar in the latest FilmCAN podcast!
FILMCANSo... reminiscing about Twitch City...
DON MCKELLARAahh, Twitch City…
FILMCANAlright, let’s start with a basic timeline: Coleslaw Warehouse (1992)?
DON MCKELLAROh, that’s this thing I did with Bruce McCulloch. I don’t think it had a huge impact. I guess I knew the Kids in the Hall and I was hanging out with them a bit, and Bruce was the one that initiated that because I had a theatre troupe called the Augusta Theatre Company and he was a big fan and came out to a lot of shows.
FILMCANWhere were the shows at?
DON MCKELLARThe Poor Alex, Theatre Passe Muraille. They were certainly experimental theatre shows. But I guess he was the first person from the sell-out world of television that I knew. So in a certain way he made it seem possible, I guess, the idea of television. Because they already had their show by then – I was on it a couple of times. I guess that’s what made me even think of television. Because even though I watched a lot of it, it never really occurred to me as a legitimate form. I guess it’s safe to say there weren’t a lot of shows on Canadian television that I had great admiration for, but I did like their show.
FILMCANAnd just after that you wrote 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould (Francois Girard, 1993).
DON MCKELLARYeah, and that doesn’t seem that similar. But it is similar in that it’s episodic. I started thinking around that time, including about the road movies (McDonald’s Roadkill, Highway 61), that I was writing very episodic. And also – and no one would make this connection – but Gould used to watch TV non-stop. He used to leave television on as background. And when he’d go to sleep he’d leave it on and if he had a strange dream he’d wake up and realize it was just the television. No one would make the connection between Curtis and Glenn Gould, though.
FILMCANObviously they’re both geniuses.
DON MCKELLARExactly. But that’s when I started thinking a lot about television, and I had television on all the time too.
FILMCANWhat about Arrowhead (Peter Lynch, 1994)? There’s a line you have about the apartment building your character lives in, something like “We don’t need clocks here, we run on TV time.”
DON MCKELLARThat’s right! That was Peter Lynch’s idea, but maybe that put in my head the idea of the TV as a timetable – in the (Twitch City) episode with the TV contest, where they use it as Curtis’ agenda book in particular. Is that what they call them, agenda books?
FILMCANDaytimer?
DON MCKELLARDaytimer! That’s how far I am from the concept of daytimers, I can’t even think of the word.
FILMCAN1995: Dance Me Outside.
DON MCKELLARI wrote Dance Me Outside kind of quickly because Bruce (McDonald) was having troubles and I said I would help him out. And that was about two weeks. I probably wasn’t writing Twitch City yet, but I was starting to think about it.
FILMCANBruce McDonald said one of the original titles for the series was Electric City.
DON MCKELLARYeah – that sounds like a bad new wave band or something. I guess one idea I had was for this horror film where electricity goes out of control and turns against mankind. Which sounds like a fine concept; maybe there was a little more logic to it than that. In any case, I had that title for quite a while, and then there was this project I was doing about an assassin who ends up being… well, more of a biography of an assassin. It was a bit of an extension of the Roadkill character. But then a bunch of movies started coming out like that. But that was also called Twitch City. These were all a bunch of projects in early stages of development. So while I was doing all those things I was watching a lot of television. And living in (Kensington) market.
FILMCANBruce also said you had the strangest writing setup in your apartment, where you could write and watch TV at the same time…
DON MCKELLARAt one point I had a television against the wall, and a mirror on the sofa, so if I sat at my desk behind my giant old computer, I could see the reflection.
FILMCANIs that where the remote control contest came out of?
DON MCKELLARI think so, yeah. And it can be done. I’ve figured out how to work the control through the mirror. Because I couldn’t get to the television. Well I could, but what’s the point of a remote if you have to get up? So that was my life for quite a while, when I wrote 32 Short Films and Twitch City.
FILMCANSo you were living around here for how long?
DON MCKELLARLong time. When I was a kid I came down to the market a lot – it was just a cool place to be. When I was growing up in north of Toronto I came down here and bought all my clothes down here. And used to hang out in the places in Kensington. Like Tigers? All these places don’t exist anymore. And there was also sort of a punk scene happening here in the market, so I was sort of into that. It was always this romantic, glamourous place to me. And it was sort of ironic, because the King of Kensington television show was not the market that I knew.
I also thought there was a natural irony in doing a show here which had parallels to King of Kensington, but was more about dispossessed kids, the sort of market types. Eccentrics… and I would say hippies, but they’re not really hippies, they’re more like people who live in the Yukon or something. You know what I mean, like people who choose to live outside the boundaries of regular society. Either they’re self-styled anarchists, or the flakier side.
So I came down here a lot. When I was in college I was living on the other side, on Beverly Street. Then I was in flux for a couple of years. Then I moved in with my girlfriend on Augusta, and I lived a long time there. Now I live outside the market – for the last five years. Three blocks away, but it makes a world of difference. But the market is still the place in Toronto, the neighbourhood that makes it distinctive, in my mind.
FILMCANIs it still a muse now?
DON MCKELLARWell, I guess so – it’s changed quite a bit. When I wrote it there was a bit of a dip. I think it’s had slighter better fortune lately. Places like this (Ideal Coffee, where the interview took place – ed.) didn’t exist. There were always cool places, but not quite so many, especially up at this end – the Augusta end. So I think it changed, and the slightly downbeat side is reflected in the show.
FILMCANThe amount of talented collaborators involved in the show is insane.
DON MCKELLARYeah, it’s true. And a lot of the people involved in the show actually got a cameo in it too. But we were very fortunate at the time, we got a great bunch of people. It was the easiest thing I ever cast, or ever been involved with. We’d just call on people we knew and liked, and they all agreed, and it was sort of effortless. So it really does, in that sense, represent a sort of zeitgeist thing.
FILMCANHow did the hook up with Danny Novak (DOP) and some of the other crew and cast come about?
DON MCKELLARWell, I was really impressed with the shooting of Hard Core Logo (1996). I thought it was one of the better-shot Canadian features at the time. And Bruce suggested Callum (Keith Rennie), which was sort of casting against type, I thought. But I was really impressed with Hard Core Logo, so I encouraged him to go with that. And stylistically, too, to try and go with some of that visual style as well. Danny Novak was great, really fast, very unafraid.
FILMCANIt’s got such a great visual feel and consistency to the whole series.
DON MCKELLARIt really doesn’t look like… television. It still maintains a film look – it doesn’t exactly look like a sitcom.
FILMCANWhat was it shot on?
DON MCKELLAR16mm film. And we had a widescreen version shot too, but when it was transferred we didn’t have the money to do both versions. Which is a shame because it could have been a great widescreen DVD release. But no one ever thought of that at the time.
FILMCANBob Wiseman? Such great accompaniment for the atmosphere.
DON MCKELLARWell, he’d just quit Blue Rodeo, seems to me, so… and we’d done a video of his – me and Tracey (Wright), my girlfriend, down at the park down there. He used to come to our plays too, so that’s how we knew him. In any case, we’d go to see his shows.
FILMCANAnd Bob Martin (The Drowsy Chaperone, Slings & Arrows) was more involved in the second season, right?
DON MCKELLARYeah, Bob was an old high school friend of mine. I asked him in the first season to write a show. Because, you know, once television gets going, there’s always a certain rush, or speed. And they were already talking about a second season. Even though I basically thought I could probably write a first season, if there was a second season I realized I’d have to figure something out because we’d have to shoot fairly quickly. So I was testing out other people to write episodes, and Bob was one of them. He wrote an episode based on an outline of mine. And that was the first time – I like to remind him of this – that Bob was asked to write for television. Then the second season, as predicted, it came down pretty quickly, and I asked Bob.
FILMCANYou mentioned in the commentary that it was important that the couch was against the wall, not in the middle of the room. And there are a lot of really blatant psychological confrontations in the series too, mostly about control. Was the couch a place for therapy?
DON MCKELLARI think there are some real issues and characters had some genuine psychological concerns. But it’s all quite veiled, or deep. Curtis is not a guy who talks about his feelings at all. And Hope is also not acknowledging her issues, so… there’s these two people who are not articulate, but they use the tools around them, like the remote, to work through their relationship. Which is, I think, accurate, in my experience.
Curtis is sick. But he’s slowly overcoming his agoraphobia, and other genuine mental illnesses. Probably I was working my stuff through him. I always said Curtis was an exaggeration of what I consider to be my flaws.
FILMCANRight. Because he’s really cheap.
DON MCKELLARThat’s right. And I bought my coffee today.
FILMCANYou said you felt like you were writing in a more episodic style then.
DON MCKELLARWell I just realized that my attention span, my natural rhythm, is more episodic. That is to say, I find movie lengths kind of unnatural. My mind thinks in shorter cycles. Maybe it’s attention span? From watching television a lot? But movies always seem too long to me. And I realized there’s nothing more natural about a movie length, where 90 minutes is somehow the rule. Even for movies I think of them as three television episodes or something. That was just the way I noticed I wrote. And somehow my short attention span became the whole character.
FILMCANWith digital downloads or DVDs people watch TV episodes back-to-back, too, and if you add up the first season of Twitch City it’s about 130 minutes – a proper feature.
DON MCKELLARAnd that’s how I convinced myself I could do it. When I got the go ahead for the series I thought it seemed long – like “Oh god, I have to write a series!” But then I realized it’s only like a TV movie.
FILMCANDid you write out the story arc for the whole season at the beginning?
DON MCKELLARA little bit. I always wanted to have an arc, but also for the episodes to sustain themselves. Which is my favourite kind of television. There wasn’t that much at the time either. My idea was that the plot would be gradually, almost imperceptibly evolving, where you feel like “Oh, I actually had some strange investment in this relationship between Curtis and Hope. More than I thought.” It is essentially a love story.
FILMCANAnd their relationship is very co-dependent, where Curtis is with this low self-esteem girl and she somehow needs him too.
DON MCKELLARThey don’t realize it at first.
FILMCANBut they’re perfect for each other.
DON MCKELLARYeah, their flaws, which are significant, end up being the pieces that hold them together.
FILMCANIs it a representation of stalled youth? It’s set in an almost student lifestyle.
DON MCKELLARWell it’s definitely reflective, a lot of the stories, of my student lifestyle, when I lived in shared houses. But that was also similarly stalled. If I hadn’t been going to school it probably would have been similar. It’s the gap period.
I don’t want to overstate it, but the whole Generation X thing was in the air. And I always thought there was something irritating about the whole way it was discussed in the press. Because I was part of that generation and I thought, yes, there’s truth to it, but it’s not about slackerdom per se – it’s about lack of available, significant entry into the world. A bunch of people are educated and that’s why they’re not working. They see there’s flaws in society, so it’s like a kind of unconsidered anarchy, maybe with an unconscious intellectual underpinning.
FILMCANIt’s strange, I saw something on IMDB that referenced the series being Tarantino-esque… I really don’t get these labels sometimes.
DON MCKELLARYeah. I actually liked those Tarantino movies, and I had dinner with him in the market, at The Boat. But I guess it’s because the characters talk about pop culture.
FILMCANBut you didn’t talk about the TV specifically that much…
DON MCKELLARThat’s true. There are a couple bits, maybe with the Newbie scenes. As a matter of fact I sort of resisted all that TV talk, because I thought there was sort of predictable. And it’s also sort of boring, people telling their favourite bits from TV shows, or repeating dialogue from other movies, that’s always a bit tedious.
In some ways the show was more of a corrective symptom of it, I thought. I wanted to see a character like Curtis, who was more smart but also somewhat edgy. So it wasn’t just that slacker Ethan Hawke character. You know, he doesn’t think he’s cool – he’s not a poet.
FILMCANThe second season seems more like a sitcom to me.
DON MCKELLARWell it definitely plays more with the sitcom conventions. It plays more with satirizing television.
FILMCANBut the first season is much more contained in a locale, in the writing even, and there’s more stuff on location. There was also a feeling like it would not have been the same if it was shot in the summer – the whole winter isolation and everything.
DON MCKELLARYeah, that was the other thing about Curtis hiding inside, cocooning. You are in the winter here, you don’t go out much. And you do think of reasons to not go out, like with the garbage thing.
FILMCANWhat I think gives the series an epic quality, and its longevity, is those exteriors in the first season, and setting it in a particular spatial context.
DON MCKELLARIt’s funny, the show always had that sort of bittersweet feeling: a sad guy trying to hook up with this girl, and he’s no good to her. Especially at the time, walking down Kensington Street at night… I’ve had friends visiting and they’re like “Where am I? I’m in Poland or something.” You know, with all these empty streets and garbage, the smell of rotting fish and things like that.
But when I was feeling lonely or had romantic problems, I remember I would come walking in the middle of the night to Kensington Market and I always had that feeling like “I’m alone in the world.” And I know from living here a lot of people here have that feeling; and then you start hearing singing in the middle of the night, and you’re like “We live here, shut-up!” That was something sad and sweet about the market that I tried to capture.
Download Season One of Twitch City here.
