Tuesdays @ 9pm on CBC
Douglas Coupland – Canada’s best author – wrote the most sublime and completely whacked novel ever with JPOD.
Thanks to the CBC, it’s now a television show…and so far, it has possibilities. But if the series premier is anything to go by, it’s trying much too hard to make those possibilities a reality.
The first 2/3’s of JPOD episode one tries too hard to be…Couplandesque. Everything is forced. The main characters are thrown at the audience with all the subtlety of a runaway train; we don’t really learn about them, we’re simply presented with them (and the video introductions simply make it worse). They should have come with a banner flying above their heads, saying fait accompli.
Except for the old timers. Sherry Miller and Alan Thicke (yes…the dad from Growing Pains) excel as parents who’ve thrown away adult expectations and behave on impulse: a pot-growing housewife who hides bodies, and a former engineer who has discovered a new life as a wanna-be actor. They’re fabulous: still slightly hemmed in by society’s expectations of middle aged parents, but determined in their awkward way to live their lives as they see fit. Excellent, experienced actors who can see the absurdities of their characters and embrace them with gusto (or, in the case of Sherry Miller’s repressed-suburban-mom, a slight, awkward twittering).
In the final third of the episode, the show finally finds that slow, simmering Coupland-style of subtle discovery. Most of it is down to the immense charm of David Kopp as Ethan, our main character, who slowly opens up by simply being allowed to be himself: a slightly mawkish young man in an environment that makes him look positively white-bread normal. His double takes, his tired sighs, and his shrugs are far more successful that his attempts and info-dumping and explanations…and he sparks well with Emilie Ullerup’s former-trailer-trash escapee, Kaitlin. The other members of the cast also begin to become more interesting, by simply observing them in slightly ridiculous situations…and watching their reactions.
JPOD was snapped up by the CBC because it was “cool” – a horrible phrase that Douglas Coupland would NEVER use. In its book incarnation, JPOD is all about the subtlety of human behaviours, and the humour lies in discovering how even the strangest of behaviours have innocent & simple explanations that are so natural…and so banal…that you can’t help but laugh. Too much of the TV version’s opening episode is concerned with sledge-hammering superficial Coupland-isms…but by the end, the seeds of what made the novel so successful are on full display. If they follow up on it, and put away the sledgehammer, then they’ll have a winner…
So we’ll wait and see…but if the second episode is equally variable, this series should go on the shelf, next to the new Bionic Woman. :-/
