Save jPod!

It’s been about ten days since this blog went live — which means it’s probably time to use it for good and not evil at least once. Hence — a cause!

No, nor Darfur. Not saving the great white mosquitoes from being clubbed by baby seals. This is for a television show which I’m not even supposed to be watching because I don’t live in Canada!

But I watch it anyway. This CBC show of pure genius is called jPod.

Let’s backtrack a bit: When author Douglas Coupland released his 1995 novel Microserfs, I went out and got myself a copy without kowing anything about Coupland’s other body of work. It was an amazing read — a new style that I hadn’t seen before. It was something about the stream-of-consciousness writing style melded with the absolute geekiness of it all. And it chronicled a group of friends and their journey from working at Microsoft to doing bigger and better things. What Coupland, in essence, did was create a blog for his main character. Years before their time. The technology of the time has since become obsolete, but Microserfs is still timeless. I re-read it every six months or so.

And I was excited to read some of his other works throughout the years. They didn’t all delve into technology and geekdom like ‘serfs did, but that was okay. He just knew how to tell a story and get characters to interact and play off of each other, presenting their pre-existing baggage and conditions at the table.

I was really excited when I heard about his 2006 novel, jPod. Following four video-game designers who worked in close proximity in a basement in Vancouver, it seemed like a logical upgrade to Microserfs! I pre-ordered it on Amazon and awaited its arrival. And tore through it like a madman when it arrived.

It really, really sucked. I felt that he was simply trying to fill pages. And, in some cases, he does fill pages. Like the eleven towards the end where he enters strings of random numbers to see if you can find the lowercase letter “l.” I was angry at Coupland for writing himself into the book. I was not happy.

Then again, I had lofty expectations for Coupland. I thought this book would make an impact on me similar to what serfs did. And the book simply wasn’t another Microserfs. I had to accept that.

And then I heard about a CBC show with the same name which was being shown in Canada.

jPod, the TV show, parallels the book to a certain degree. The character development is quite unique — and demonstrated quite well on the screen to the point that I’m not going to give any of it away. All I can tell you is that most of the cast are unknown — aside from Alan Thicke, who plays our main character’s father — a struggling movie extra in the Vancouver film scene.

The show has been quite good — better than most other television options I’ve had since this winter due to the strike. There was critical acclaim in the Canadian press — but they decided to move it to Friday nights to die. And now the Save jPod movement is trying to get enough stir to get them back into production. (Twelve episodes have been filmed; ten have been shown so far, and the remaining two are expected to be shown next week and the week after.) And why not? It’s co-written by Coupland and is raw, funny, geeky and sex-charged. What more could you want?

If you live in Canada, you can watch episodes online at cbc.ca. If you live elsewhere, well *cough* I’m sure you can think of something. All I know is that if this ever comes out on DVD, they’ve got enough of a fanbase in the USA to scoop it up.

Here’s a production promo for the show. It does contain spoilers, so be forewarned: