jPod: Score One For Canadian TV?
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Posted to Media on Fri Aug 08, 2008 at 08:14:58 AM EST (promoted by port1080). RSS.
Somewhere deep in the cube farm of a Vancouver, BC corporate megalith that "resembles, but legally no way is Electronic Arts" lies a group of videogame programmers known as Jpod. As a group they're younger, more attractive, closer-knit and slightly more screwed up than most software engineers. Moreover, they spend an entertaining but unrealistic amount of work time dealing with family issues and Chinese gangsters. Wait, what?
Douglas Coupland's2006 novel Jpod was a return to familiar territory: techies. The format and tone echo his 1995 novel, Microserfs, but with a post-internet boom edge. Where Microserfs followed a group of 20-something techies earnestly beavering away at Microsoft and subsequently leaving to do a startup, Jpod follows a similar group who take a far more detached view of things. Post-crash and post-Enron, techies had to accept that being able to code wasn't a guarantee of instant wealth and that giving your every waking moment to the company frequently meant nothing but being the fattest one at the layoff announcement meeting. Jpod is peppered with the kind of smart, ironic commentary and pop culture references that made Coupland a star and "Generation X" the predominant meme of the early 90s. Freakishly, it was CBC (Canada's PBS) that stepped up and brought Jpod to television. Even more freakishly, it's really good.
Our protagonist, Ethan Jarlewski, is knee-deep into Board-X, a gore-heavy skateboard game he hopes will eclipse the Tony Hawk franchise. Outside of work he's beset with the usual problems that face a 25ish male North American: Ethan's mother has killed a biker who was buying weed from her basement grow-op and needs help disposing of the body. Ethan's brother has smuggled a shipment of Chinese sweatshop workers into the country and stored them in young Ethan's apartment, bringing him to the attention of Kam Fong, a Chinese-Canadian gangster who manages to insert himself into every area of Ethan's life. Finally, Board-X has been placed under the purview of a new VP who's decided that what the game needs most is an edgy turtle sidekick. And that's just Episode 1.
On our way through Season One we encounter (in no particular order and brought to you spoiler-free by the makers of Chugatussin)
- An evil McSpokesclown for a burger franchise who becomes a national hero
- jCola, Ethan's homemade "Cola of the Gods"
- The "Hug Machine"
- Lez-agna
- Cowboy, the shirtless testosterone-dripping office playa, discovering the dark side of Craigslist's "Casual Encounters"
- Alan Thicke in the role he was born to play
When you think of ground-breaking quality television drama there are certain words that spring to mind: HBO, Showtime, maybe PBS. "Canadian" usually isn't on the list. Jpod, however, is one of the freshest things I've seen this year. Lucky Canadians, basking in the soft glow of clean streets and universal health care, have known about Jpod for months. Down here in the backwaters of sleepy little America are largely ignorant of this gem. Fear not, potential Podsters. There's good news and bad news. First the good: Jpod is available on iTunes, there's a DVD coming September 9th and you can "obtain" full episodes from all the usual places where people obtain media content. Now the bad: Jpod has been cancelled. Why? Putting my tinfoil hat on I'll cite the same reasons usually given for Firefly's cancellation (zero promotion and the timeslot of death for a series amied at an 18-30 demographic: Friday nights at 9pm) plus a relatively plausible theory blaming the whole thing on the continuing suckage of the Toronto Maple Leafs. Furthermore, the CBC seems to have the same problem as the rest of the television industry: they only count viewers who watch the show on televisions and only those who qualify as Neilsen families by maintaining the same address for more than two years. This standard leaves out those who watched Jpod on the CBC website or downloaded it via bittorrent (ahem) and radically undersamples the target audience. After all, how many people between 18 and 30 stay in one place for more than two years? While there's an active movement afoot to save Jpod, we may have to be happy with 13 episodes of great television.
It's rare that a story can survive translation from one medium to another. You can count on one hand the number of movies that were as good as the book they were based on. When a movie is ported to TV the results are rarely comparable and frequently degrade the original through epic suckitude. Part of this is the limitations of the media itself. A movie can't really cover more than 80 pages or so of a novel and has to begin, peak and end in 90-150 minutes. A (non-British) TV series has to fill 13 episodes of either 23 or 48 minutes of airtime with enough peaks and resolutions to keep the plot going while maintaining the prospect of continuing for another season...and another...and another... Jpod is a rare instance of a great novel being turned into a great TV series.
And if anyone at Showtime or HBO reads TNT, there's a great TV show up North and I'm pretty sure you can buy it for a few cases of Molson Canadian and some Leafs season tickets. How about it?
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