Coupland TV: JPod on CBC

Last night we made up for our dumb-assedness last week and caught episode 2 of Douglas Coupland's JPod, and damn if that weren't a strange beast. Coupland's surreal, self-referential, novelistic discourse on globalism has been transformed into an odd-ball, dry-humored, dramedy miniseries that's strangely addictive.

The show centers on Ethan and his fellow programmers in the "J" pod at Vancouver's EA (redubbed Neotronic Arts for the show) campus. Ethan & co. are working on a skateboarding video game, roughly trying to find the right balance between edgy and gore vis-à-vis a moronic turtle character their boss forced them to add in a moment of insipid inspiration. But more specific to the plot of last night's episode, "A Fine Bro-mance," is Ethan's discovery upon arriving at his apartment that his brother seems to have used it to store about 20 Asians trafficked into Canada, bound for servitude in the US. The selfsame brother, Greg, is meanwhile holed up in a chic club, simultaneously selling condos and cougar hunting.

Ethan's mother Carol turns out to have a sophisticated suburban grow operation in the garage a la Weeds, and a penchant for vehicular homicide. Alan Thicke--as Ethan's dad Jim--pursues a career as an actor in a show with perhaps the worst concept ever: Hitler's Kitten. (While we remain unfamiliar with the purported plot, from what we gather, the title more or less says it all.)

The rest of the episode (not to give it away) involves a drug deal gone bad, manslaughter, mistaken royal connections, night school, and ballroom dancing. It's strange--reading Coupland's work, with characters whose speech is defined by whip-smart, knee-jerk irony, we honestly figured his TV show would be faster paced. But of course these are Canadians, and Canadian television is a sort of strange amalgam of American and British styles. But hey, it's funny. And weird. Very weird. Plus, we've discovered that the CBC makes all the episodes available online after broadcast, so for all those who've missed episodes, head over to the official site, click the link for "episodes" and the player info is to the right.

JPod // Tuesdays @ 9pm // CBC (channel 2 on Broadstripe, channel 99 on Comcast) // next week's episode: "Emo-tion Capture"