"I'm cooking a turkey today...which I've never done before.  I've never cooked a turkey.  A girlfriend of mine is at my place as we speak, stuffing the bird, so we can get it in the oven.  I can't believe that I'm doing this."
    It's just before Christmas and Molly Parker is sitting at The Last Temptation in Kensington Market, drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, looking gorgeous, talking about Twitch City and domestic duties.
    "I've embraced all these obvious woman things like gardening - I just love being in the dirt and making things grow - and cooking.  I love it.  I'm turning into my mother.  I'm away so much that when I am home I get so into being domestic.  Suddenly it's so joyous to not be in a hotel and just be able to fold laundry or something.  It's silly, but it's nice."
    The 25-year-old Parker just won a best actress Genie for her performance as a girl cultivating a close and personal relationship with the dead in last year's feature Kissed.  ("I just got cable yesterday and I ended up watching a Goddard film, so TV is pretty great.  I got cable so that I could watch the broadcast of the Genies, but the cable didn't arrive in time - but, that's okay, I don't really want to see it.")
    Now, in Bruce McDonald's brilliant new CBC series she's the normal one, the girl with her feet firmly planted on the ground while all her lunacy reigns supreme.  The Don McKellar-penned comedy centres around Curtis (played by McKellar), an agoraphobic weirdo with a TV fetish, living in a Kensington Market apartment with his various tenants.  And then there's Hope - the love interest and oasis of stability - played by Parker.
    "She's the straight woman.  She's certainly got her own problems, but she keep it all together.  She is the light of these people's lives, she really is hope.  She doesn't have it together, but she's trying so hard to make everything work, to make everyone like each other...she's a woman who has a bit of a savoir thing, she likes to be with people whom she thinks she can help."
    Coming right off the set of Fox Television's horror flick Dean Koonz' Intensity last year, shooting the series was good for the soul.
    "Every cell in my body was screaming out, 'Don't go to work.'  It was so hard...so I did Twitch City right after that and it was such a joy and so fun and sweet," says Parker, whose performance is but one solid one in an ensemble that also includes Daniel MacIvor, Bruce McCulloch (as the host of a talk show-within-a-show) and Callum Keith Rennie.  That even the presence of an occasionally talking cat can't ruin the show should give you an idea of howgood it is.  ("It was a very nice cat, but I'm allergic to cats and I'm not a big cat fan, so I would have to take antihistamines every day to work with him.")
    "What I really love about it, is that it assumes the intelligence of the audience.  When I watched the first episode for the first time, I thought something is weird here, what's strange about this?  And it's that there's no laugh track and we're so used to that.  We're so used to being told what's funny and when to laugh, that we don't think about what we're watching.  So it's so refreshing to watch this show and realize that you don't have to laugh if you don't want to."
    McKellar is very excited about Parker's performance in the role, which appears to have been custom made for her, but isn't.
    "I didn't even know her when I wrote it.  I met her in Vancouver at the script reading that I was at, and we went out after and had some drinks and I knew immediately from the way she laughed at my jokes that she was a talented actress.  I didn't write it with her in mind, although I would have if I'd known her," says McKellar.
    With Twitch City slotted after This Hour Has 22 Minutes on Mondays, viewers can look forward to that rarest of creatures: a full hour of Canadian-made television that doesn't suck.  (Except when preempted by those pesky Olympic Games for a couple of weeks in February.
    And is there more to come?
    "I don't really know,"Parker says.  "Don wrote six episodes and I really think he meant forit to be a limited series.  British television really knows how to do that and not overkill it and not run a series for five years until that was good about it is gone.  There's only 13 episodes of Fawlty Towers, you know."
    Yeah, so you still owe us seven.