It’s the first day of the in-studio portion of the shoot, and just before breaking for lunch the entire Twitch City cast and crew gather around the camera grinning while a couple of sharply dressed cats steal the spotlight.

One wears a gold lame blouse while the other sports a crisp white shirt and tie. The felines lounge on small, pet-friendly leather couches on the set of The Rex Reilly Show as animal wranglers, armed with a ball of string on a stick, do their best to get the cats to sit up straight.

The cameras started rolling Feb. 15 and will continue until the end of March for seven episodes and season two of Twitch City. The new shows – budgeted at a low $400,000 per episode – are slated to air on cbc, tentatively beginning in October, following a rebroadcast of the original six-pack from last year.

Shadow Shows and Accent Entertainment are producing the comedy series, created by and starring Don McKellar and written by McKellar and Bob Martin. Susan Cavan is executive producer with Bruce McDonald, who has resumed his position in the director’s chair. Cinematographer Danny Nowak is back behind the camera and Curtis (played by McKellar) is back on the tattered floral sofa.

Rhombus International holds the foreign sales rights to Twitch City and will be taking the show to the markets for the first time this year. According to Cavan, there is already interest from England, Australia and the u.s.

While the story pretty much picks up where last year left off, Cavan says the new episodes are slightly more extreme in terms of the situations Curtis puts himself in.

‘What’s different this year is that Curtis’ particular alternative lifestyle has some strain put on it just by his girlfriend moving in,’ says Cavan. ‘He has to cope in his own weird way with a real live-in relationship.’

The shoot started off with two weeks on location in Toronto’s Kensington Market before moving into the studio which houses the set of Curtis’ dusty, dingy apartment where the majority of the action, or anti-action, unfolds.

This season, Hope, played by Molly Parker (Kissed) has moved in with Curtis, and like the anti-hero couch potato himself, is developing a passion for sitting in front of the tv for hours on end. Daniel MacIvor (House) plays Nathan, Curtis’ ex-roommate who is serving time in jail, and Callum Keith Rennie (Last Night) is convenience store guru Newbie.

Making special guest appearances are Jennifer Jason Leigh and Tracy Wright (Last Night). Mark McKinney (Kids in the Hall) is Rex Riley, host of Curtis’ favorite Jerry Springer-like talk show, and Ken Walsh is Hope’s partially deaf father who Curtis hits up for rent money.

Style-wise, McDonald says he and Nowak are pushing the boundaries on framing. Rather than shooting the usual way with the person in the middle of the scene, at times they are capturing the actor in the bottom left corner, for example, leaving a window of blank space filling the rest of the screen.

‘We are basically using this as an experiment with visual style and pushing the boundaries,’ says McDonald as he scrawls a picture on the table illustrating his point. ‘The frame is very unusual at times but it’s interesting and it makes usual ordinary scenes fresh.’

Coming back to something that went so well the first time around, as did season one, and keeping it fresh and exciting is a challenge for the director, who puts an emphasis on constantly pushing style and performance.

A couple of performances McDonald seems to have little control over, however, are those of the cats, which come in both real-life and stuffed versions, and on day one of the in studio shoot seem to be garnering all the attention.

It’s kind of like a Planet of the Apes only with cats.

Someone – McDonald won’t reveal who – is having a dream where cats, led by Curtis’ pet Lucky, take over the world and the airwaves, making every show on tv about cats.

Aside from the feline frenzy on The Rex Reilly Show, there’s the seafaring adventure show The Old Cat And The Sea, which called for a cat in a yellow rain slicker hanging out by a small lighthouse surrounded by some stuffed buddies.