"Only on Canadian TV," sighs Molly Parker, who plays the heroine Hope on CBC's returning series Twitch City.  "We're finally coming back on TV and it's only taken us 3 1/2 years to get this far."
    Parker explains the first six episodes of the quirky comedy were made in Toronto in 1997.
    Then there was a year's wait until the series aired - "it got pre-empted for the Olympics for several weeks during its run.  And then there was a wait of a year for CBC to order seven more episodes.  "That second batch was shot last year and now, finally, we're back on."
    But only on Canadian TV would Twitch City have got on at all.  It's an intensely dark satire about the effects TV is having on a generation of viewers.  The "second season" starts Wednesday night at 9 on CBC.
    Creator Don McKellar stars as agoraphobic Curtis, who never goes outside but spends most of his time on his sofa watching the most inane TV fare from old sitcoms to hockey talk shows.
    Parker plays perennially optimistic girlfriend Hope and as Parker admits "She's pretty weird, herself.  Her name says a lot about her.  She has fastened on to Curtis and they have this relationship where he is totally dependant on her.  She brings him food.  She brings home the money from a series of awful jobs.
    "But she is filled with concern for Curtis.  She always thinks he is getting better but he is actually regressing even more.  She's at that stage in a young girl's life where she feels she must look after a man.  Maybe she'll outgrow this feeling but somehow I doubt it."
    McKellar's Curtis character lives in Kensington area in a seedy row house where he rents out rooms.  His roommate Nathan (Daniel McIvor) is serving a prison term for accidentally killing a street derelict (Al Waxman from King of Kensington).
    The first new episode, Parker promises, is "way, way out!"  Curtis isn't even seen -  the whole episode is an inspired satirical sendup of the prison series Oz.  "It was so strange shooting it," Parker reports.  "It's about Nathan in prison and how he is getting to like the place.  But it also suggests Hope is not exactly all there."
    CBC should have started by rerunning the first six episodes.  But the fact the series struggled back at all is a miracle.
    "There was a lot of fun on this set," Parker reports.  "There's one scene where Don has to eat breakfast food from the floor like a dog.  That broke me up.  And Kenneth Welsh as my domineering but deaf father was so funny in person that when I went home at night my sides ached."
    Talk about six degrees of separation - Parker was originally picked for Twitch City after being directed by Bruce McDonald in an episode of Lonesome Cowboy.
    "I had already made the movie Kissed but it wasn't released.  I played a killer on the western and working with Bruce is a treat.  I've just finished a new picture called Suspicion River directed by Lynn Stopkewich who directed me in Kissed.  It also feature my constant co-star Callum Keith Rennie who plays convenience store clerk Newbie in Twitch City."
    Since the first batch of Twitch City was made, Parker, McKellar and Rennie have become hot properties.  Rennie co-starred in CTV's Due South and made such movies as ExistenZ.  Mc Kellar co-wrote The Red Violin and wrote, directed, and starred in the movie Last Night.
    Parker was born in Vancouver but now makes her home in Toronto.  She was phoning from Los Angeles where she was auditioning for several movies.  "I think I'm going to do the next Wayne Wang movie," she reports.  But there's a chance of a movie in Russia.
    "I definitely am not in L.A. for the U.S. pilot series.  To get stuck in an American series where the females are powered down after every take would be torture.  I much prefer Hope who wears such awful, girlish clothes and has that crazy hairdo."
    Parker reports she had three films at Sundance this year, had two films at last year's Toronto Festival.  Her biggest one, Sunshine with Ralph Fiennes, has yet to open in the U.S., hence its absence from the Oscar race.
    "I came back to Twitch City because there remained big questions about poor Hope," says Parker.  "I mean why is she sticking it out with this guy?  The new episodes look closely at her character.  I just think she's intensely funny despite her pain.  The relationship with her domineering father explains a lot about her."
    McKellar agrees 13 episodes in 3 1/2 years is hardly prolific.
    "but I know we'd never get this made in the American system.  I tried to wrap everything up after six shows.  This new set of seven examines Curtis and Hope as this weird team.  Are they going to make it?   Curtis may be beyond saving but what about Hope?  I've actually known women in strange relationships like this."