To the few who saw it, “Twitch City,” a short-lived Canadian series that revolved around its main character’s crippling attachment to his television, stood out as a bold and perversely literal form of meta-TV.It's this kind of thing that kind of made me dislike Twitch City when it was on the air. The very idea of an "anti-sitcom" makes it feel to me like McKellar channeled the derisive, I hate the theatre character he would later lampoon in Slings & Arrows and let him create a TV series.
Produced by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and created by Don McKellar, a Renaissance man of the Toronto indie film scene who won a Tony last year as a writer of the hit Broadway musical “The Drowsy Chaperone,” the comedy ran for a mere 13 episodes over two seasons in 1998 and 2000. But it attained cult status at home and abroad and is the rare television show that also holds up as a work of media scholarship. (It was shown here on Bravo in 2000 and is being released in a two-disc DVD set Feb. 20.)
Its protagonist, a socially challenged shut-in named Curtis (played by Mr. McKellar), spends almost all his time glued to the television, often to a “Jerry Springer” -like confessional circus called “The Rex Reilly Show.” To watch “Twitch City,” in other words, is often to watch someone watch TV. The screen serves as a de facto mirror — a nifty trick for a show about the vortexlike pull and mind-altering possibilities of television.
On the DVD commentary Mr. McKellar calls “Twitch City” an “anti-sitcom.” Many of the plot convolutions are indeed satiric variations on the roommate shenanigans that have long been a sitcom staple. (Joyce DeWitt of “Three’s Company” pops up in a knowing cameo.)
I found Twitch City incredibly smug. Not that TV wasn't (and isn't) a rich target, but I just don't think McKellar, with his connection to the precious and elitist world of Canadian film, was the right guy to level the critiques. I thought Larry Sanders, for instance, was a far sharper satire of TV. Even forgotten series like Beggars and Choosers hit harder. (Actually, there's a show I'd like to see on DVD.) It always seemed to me that Twitch City was more interested in saying something important than being entertaining. And that's the kind of attitude that I don't like, either in film or TV.
But here's the thing. It sure was different. And that feeling of mine? Well, that's personal taste. I mean, the original Newsroom was just as savage and smug about TV news as Twitch City was about TV and those who watch it. (And just to qualify it further, I have loved some stuff McKellar's done. Last Night, Highway 61, 32 Short Films about Glenn Gould, his work in Slings, lots of stuff.)
So while I probably won't be re-watching the show on DVD, the last paragraph of the review in the Times really gave me pause:
Slowly but surely, partly because of the collapse of syndication, (which DaVinci and Cold Squad are rushing in to fill in U.S. markets) and DVD leaks like this, the Corner Gas sets, Trailer Park Boys, Slings & Arrows and the like, there is a distinct flavor of Canadian TV that is starting to make itself known in the USA.
Curtis is neither a mindless viewer nor a stereotypical pop-culture savant. His obsession is somehow deeper and purer: he watches TV silently, without ironic comment, “to learn from it and not laugh at it,” he says. As a case study Curtis supports the contention of his fellow Canadian Marshall McLuhan that the effects of television are more relevant than the content. In “Twitch City” the medium truly is the message.
I wonder what happens first. Changing attitudes at home, or even more recognition in the USA which finally makes it "okay" for Canadians to like our own stuff? Hmm.
Or, you know, maybe I just need to knock my head in with a hammer.
7 rumbles:
Yeah. That last thing. Because what I was saying earlier about our inability to produce American-style sitcoms not being a bad thing? This is what I was talking about.
I appreciate that shows like this are not to your personal taste, or even the taste of the majority. I grant you that from a business and marketing point of view they are a nightmare. We certainly can't base our entire industry around shows like 'Twitch City', and it may be that this is what has been happening. I suppose we could do with a few more 'Corner Gas' successes just to keep things viable (damn you, economic reality!!).
Having said that (don't you hate it when you see that in a comment?), I strongly believe that there is also a place for shows like 'Twitch City' and 'The Newsroom' and 'Wonderland' and their ilk in Canadian television. A place for the minority, if you like. That place may be on Bravo or Showcase, but I really hope it doesn't come to that because that would be, like, two-tiered television.
If you really wanted a guaranteed hit, you could just do some boilerplate, '4 People in a Room' sitcom. It would get huge ratings and make a lot of money. It would 'connect with the audience'. It might even be well written and entertaining.
It would also be indistinguishable from a dozen other American sitcoms unless you threw in a Toronto skyline and a couple of Mounties.
What makes Canadian shows Canadian isn't the cities they're set in or the number of hockey references per episode. It's that weird 'differentness' that inspired the New York Times to review 'Twitch City' instead of, say, 'Two and a Half Men'. And no, it's not about the approval - it's just recognition from an objective viewpoint that what we do is somehow unique.
I'm not a network exec. I'm not a television writer. I'm just an avid viewer, and I would truly despair if a way wasn't found to keep putting shows like 'Twitch City' on the air.
Go. Find a way.
Okay, wait a minute though -- they do tons of 4 people in a room sitcoms that fail every year down south. And why? Because they're not funny.
The Newsroom was very un-American sitcom and got good numbers when it came out...and you know what? It was funny.
I stuck it out with Wonderland for a long time just because I liked Michael Healey, loved Cara Pifko, and Michael Murphy...but they tinkered with it and tinkered with it and it never became more than Cara in a scene with nowhere to go because someone else was yelling at her. They tried to to change up the work relationship several times, and never gained ground in viewers.
Doing an "anti-sitcom" is a really bad idea on a channel that doesn't have a lot of shows people watch.
Doing a show for "people who don't watch TV" (which is how one of the pilots screened by CBC last year was described) doesn't make sense either.
I don't give a crap about something being Canadian and part of it being Canadian is the virtue of how different it is.
I care about it being entertaining.
And that doesn't mean lowest common denominator, or Two and a Half Men, or dumbed down....people who say it does are just being weird and elitist.
Entertain the people first. If that's not a Canadian value, then it should be.
"I don't give a crap about something being Canadian and part of it being Canadian is the virtue of how different it is."
And yet you just finished saying, "there is a distinct flavor of Canadian TV that is starting to make itself known in the USA."?
How exactly would you define that flavour then?
Also, I did not mean to imply that all '4 People in a Room' sitcoms are dumbed down ('All In the Family', 'Frasier', 'Seinfeld' - lots of quality examples). I simply meant that they are incredibly common. It's a formula that the Americans have honed and perfected over several decades, which is why whenever we attempt one it looks like a cheap knockoff.
There are other styles of comedy that we do quite well. Entertainingly, even. Some might qualify as sitcoms, but when I talk about 'American-style sitcoms', I'm talking about four people in a room. Usually with canned or live laughter. Sometimes they go way out on a limb and have six people in two rooms ('Friends'), but otherwise it's pretty standard.
'Twitch City', 'The Newsroom', even 'Corner Gas' may all be sitcoms, but they are not this type of sitcom that the Americans do so well and we do so poorly.
Am I making any more sense?
I bought the DVD of Twitch City for myself at Christmas as a guilty pleasure. It was just this past weekend I watched the entire series in two days. I thought it ended after 7 episodes so viewing the 8 through 13 was fantastic.
What it says about TV in no longer relevant in 2007. It's more of a nostalgia about what we used to feel about TV...
Hey Denis,
Thanks for drawing attention to the New York Times Twitch review. Nice for your Canadian readers to get a glimpse at some of the amazing press the DVD’s been getting stateside. Thanks also for conceding that this kind of attention can only help Canadian TV in general. Good for you for coming up with the positive spin. It obviously pained you to be nice.
But still, you magnanimously admit that personal taste was a factor in your initial negative response to the show, and I hope you agree that the concept of “entertainment” is equally subjective. Believe it or not, I esteem entertainment as highly as you do. I’m almost certain. When I wrote Twitch I tried, to the best of my abilities, to create engaging characters, satisfying and surprising plots, compelling story arcs, and so forth. The show drew great numbers when it aired (numbers the CBC would kill for now – although I know that’s not saying much) and it was sold to almost every territory in the world. If the show has endured and is still appreciated today, I’m certain to a large degree that’s because of its entertainment value, and not merely because of the meta-textual complexity that Cultural Theory grads seem to so relish.
As if to illustrate the point, fans frequently tell me they find the show, um, “hilarious” -- to quote the New York Times.
If on top of that the show also had something to say – God forbid – it may have been because I thought that was entertaining too.
By the way, Twitch City wasn’t -- like Larry Sanders, Beggars and Choosers (a show that pretty much defined smug, self-involved, insider television, in my opinion) and a dozen other shows, good and bad, I could name – a satire about making television. It was about viewing television. Being obsessed with television – a much more democratic theme and one that, despite my “precious and elitist” affiliations, I felt more than qualified to tackle.
Why? Because I love TV and I watch it a lot -- high-brow/low-brow, hour/half-hour, drama/reality – and in my educated opinion the best kind of television, in all formats, makes room for invention, originality, and intelligence. There’s no conflict between intelligence and entertainment, and it’s certainly elitist to suggest that there is. In fact, almost every popular new show is innovative and formally unique, to some degree.
I guess what rubbed me the wrong way about your posting – and perhaps I’m reading too much into it – was the whiff of faux-populism, a very popular scent in the Industry these days. There’s a very real danger of condescension when we start to suggest that “entertainment” is all that really matters to the common viewer.
I know I’m starting to misrepresent you here, Denis – and believe me, I have loved some of the stuff you’ve written on these pages, lots of stuff – but, as long as we’re being honest, I think you’re sometimes too eager to idolize “craft” at the expense of all else. Inspiration, for example. Handiness with the craft is certainly valuable – indispensable -- for a TV writer, and a manly appreciation of the craft is winning and modestly becoming, especially for a scribe like you, eager to hone a gruff, mid-level, working-writer persona. But craft can also be a defense, a bluff. And there’s nothing more insufferable than a dull, well-crafted, quality show that has nothing to say. To be frank, I don’t believe Canadian audiences are particularly clamouring for more expect craftsmanship either. They want TV that’s new, surprising, thrilling and smart. Whether the results are network gold mines or good honest alt-tv, I believe it’s our job as writers to make the best TV we can and not to second-guess the intelligence and the sophistication of our audiences. Those viewers are pretty smart.
So that, in a roundabout way, was one of the high-fallutin’ points I was trying to make with Twitch City.
The Times seemed to get it.
(In all sincerity, I have great respect for your excellent site. I find it provocative and often brave. And incredibly on the ball: you spotted that lovely review before I did. Thanks.)
Hey Don,
First of all, congratulations on the DVD release and the review in the Times. You've had quite a run recently, and good for you. I hope your good friends tease you endlessly by referring to you as "D.McKellar, renaissance man of the Toronto indie film scene, NYTimes..." There are worse pull quotes.
In retrospect, I suppose I might have provided better context by stating that Twitch did alright for CBC when it was on the air -- the Times calling it "little seen" might suggest otherwise. And maybe I could have googled a bit heavier to find the press at the time that could help divine your state of mind in creating the show. I'm glad you weighed in and set the record straight. I would certainly not wish to misrepresent your point of view on the way to giving my own.
I assure you in this case, my populism isn't faux -- though I think I understand the attitude you're talking about.
I can't speak for the meetings you take up there in the rarefied air -- but in gruff mid level working writer land, I've seen far less of the effect you're talking about, and a lot more of not thinking about the audience at all, or at least thinking about them as an afterthought.
As a much younger, more fresh-faced baby TV industry worker, I guess I never recovered from the one-two punch of hearing a fairly high profile Canadian filmmaker say to me in a greenroom, "I don't give a fuck about the audience when I make my films." And then there was the Telefilm analyst who spoke to my University class. When she was asked about Telefilm supporting more commercial fare, she was dismissive and said something to the effect of, "I suppose we could always fund things like Porkys."
I've seen that attitude at play more than I care to think about, and I think the whole faux populist thing might be a cyclical reaction to that far more ingrained Canadian industry impulse.
I find it suspect that the Telefilm push to make more accessible films (though admittedly implemented horribly) met with such resistance from established quarters of the industry. I really wish that initiative was given more of a chance.
I appreciate your perspective on my tendency to harp on craft here. I admit, guilty as charged. I guess I would simply say to that it's been my experience that a lack of craft is often used to conceal ideas that aren't nearly as interesting as the artist thinks they are. That's the thing about a really well-structured work -- if you've got that, then it's a whole lot easier to see when the emperor has no clothes.
I don't mean to shortchange the inspiration side of things, it's just that I feel that writing a lot about inspiration here would be insufferably twee. I guess at the end of the day I think if the craft was better in this country, then maybe the audiences would appreciate the ideas a little more.
I agree wholeheartedly with you that a well crafted work with nothing to say is a deadly thing indeed.
The truth is, I think we're not really all that far apart on our thinking of how we get to something good.
Part of the reason why I was careful to qualify my feelings about Twitch City is because I too know several people who liked it-- a lot. So there you go.
I think we all have to be a bit more honest in stating our likes and dislikes. There's a twin disease stalking our industry, holding quality back: the impulse to overpraise stuff that doesn't deserve it because we are a small club and everybody knows everybody, and that other, peculiar, awful Canadian condition of just roasting everything out of personal jealousy. The lack of magnanimity in this industry is something I find quite appalling.
I'll be the first to say when I like something, the first to say when I don't. I reserve the right to be out of step with other people, and I would hope other people would always give me their honest opinion, too, even if it hurts.
From the working trenches of Palookaville to the towers of the renaissance -- thanks for reading and stopping by. I look forward to the next thing you do that makes me laugh and think.
Good luck with the DVD.
Best,
Denis
What a gracious response!
I won't drag this out -- this thread is already reaching the breaking point and, in any case, I agree with almost every word you wrote (I say almost because of the unnecessary "much" you included before "younger") -- but But if you’d like me, as a denizen of the more established quarters, to explain the resistance to those recent Telefilm initiatives, at least from my personal perspective, I’ll give it a shot:
I'd say it was the horrible implementation you speak of that turned so many off. I doubt there are many filmmakers who would object to the stated objective -- to get more folks into Canadian theatres (although domestic box-office shouldn’t be the only standard). But it was embarrassing to see Telefilm strut about Hollywood, wide-eyed, like a film student with his first short on YouTube, blushing and cooing at an agent’s sweet nothings. Their proclamations: dumb and naïve, as if they were the first ever to consider that movies might make money. Suddenly, every filmmaker who had been trying to stir up the moribund industry, who had worked to raise the profile of Canadian cinema at home and abroad, or who had been so presumptuous as to show his work in Cannes or Berlin, was rebranded a pampered aesthete or –- worst of all! -- an “auteur”. Meanwhile, with tragic irony, Telefilm (I’m personifying the agency so as not to name names) betrayed an unforgivable snobbery in deciding that Canadians would see any piece of crap as long as it had the outward trappings of commercial moviemaking.
That’s what galled me – I think you’ll understand. As I said about TV: I like all kinds. I have nothing but respect for genre filmmaking. I love a good horror film, for example, but I think a good one is as rare as a good Art House film. And as challenging to make. Horror buffs are demanding too. They’re not so gullible as to line-up for anything with blood, breasts and B-level stars on the poster. At least not repeatedly.
The government can come up with all kinds of incentives for the Industry – and they should – but if Telefilm is to actively select projects for support they should choose those with the highest aspirations. Whatever budget, whatever classification. They should be projects that at least have a chance at being good. If they are, audiences will find them.
In the end, I’m not making a very contentious point, and I’m sure almost everyone now working at Telefilm would think that it self-evident. It’s cyclical – as you say -- and the cynical angle has pretty much washed out in the cycle. But let’s try to remember for the next go-around that Canadians want (and need) a culture that inspires them, that they can be proud of, that they think is cool. Let’s start with that.
Sorry to once again get all speechy. It’s a Renaissance Man symptom I can’t seem to shake. I promise I’ll leave it at that unless you really piss me off (doubt you will).
Thanks for procrastinating with me.
Don
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