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May. 31st, 2010 09:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
felis_ultharusSo I finished watching jPod this week, the Douglas Coupland's TV adaptation of his own book about a team of freakish genius video-game programmers assigned to the same team by computer error because their last names all started with "J." The show also focuses much more than the book on Ethan Jarlewski's freakish family, who are essentially the Brady Bunch as written by Quentin Tarantino.
Nine-tenths of the series is perfect dark comedy. The acting is excellent and breathes a lot of life into characters that were already excellent (though a little icy). And CBC censors nothing except brand names, so it's pretty astonishing what they can get away with.
There were flaws, though.
The biggest irritation in the series is the way it treats it's (many, many) lesbian characters. Every lesbian in the series is just waiting for a guy to screw her straight. I don't remember how many there were - twenty, at least. That's an impressive number for a series of only thirteen episodes.
I had a much larger rant here psycoanalyzing Douglas Coupland. But I doubt that anybody reads my long rants under the cuts anyway, so I figured I'd skip it. But it's an already overused trope that the series uses again and again and again, so I had plenty of time to wonder what the audience and even network reaction would've been if it had been straight guys leaping in large numbers into bed with gay men. Probably not good.
And the Dianic Wiccan lesbian commune in jPod? This is Coupland, so it's an insincere place, a fake family, full of women yearning for that heterosexual, suburban matrimony that Coupland (a gay man) seems to fetishize. Funny thing was, while he designed the commune to look ridiculous - and the Dianic rituals were way over the top - it really did look like a paradise to me. If there's a gay male version, I'd run there.
(It'd be essentially a year-round Radical Faerie farm, with electricity.)
As usual, I'm making the show sound much worse than it actually is. It's an excellent series when there isn't a lesbian onscreen, and sometimes an excellent series when one is. If TV was actually like that normally I might get one. I actually laughed out loud a lot, which is something I rarely do in real life.
This is also the very first time I've seen a TV version of anything that was much better than the original. TV's usual weaknesses actually balance out Coupland's weaknesses quite well - its ordinary sappiness warms up the coldness of Coupland's novel. Also, working in real time forces Coupland to be more lucid.
Also, I've finally updated my historical blog - only five months late! This one is about Roswell George Mills, the first openly gay man we know of in Canada (in the 1910s).
Nine-tenths of the series is perfect dark comedy. The acting is excellent and breathes a lot of life into characters that were already excellent (though a little icy). And CBC censors nothing except brand names, so it's pretty astonishing what they can get away with.
There were flaws, though.
The biggest irritation in the series is the way it treats it's (many, many) lesbian characters. Every lesbian in the series is just waiting for a guy to screw her straight. I don't remember how many there were - twenty, at least. That's an impressive number for a series of only thirteen episodes.
I had a much larger rant here psycoanalyzing Douglas Coupland. But I doubt that anybody reads my long rants under the cuts anyway, so I figured I'd skip it. But it's an already overused trope that the series uses again and again and again, so I had plenty of time to wonder what the audience and even network reaction would've been if it had been straight guys leaping in large numbers into bed with gay men. Probably not good.
And the Dianic Wiccan lesbian commune in jPod? This is Coupland, so it's an insincere place, a fake family, full of women yearning for that heterosexual, suburban matrimony that Coupland (a gay man) seems to fetishize. Funny thing was, while he designed the commune to look ridiculous - and the Dianic rituals were way over the top - it really did look like a paradise to me. If there's a gay male version, I'd run there.
(It'd be essentially a year-round Radical Faerie farm, with electricity.)
As usual, I'm making the show sound much worse than it actually is. It's an excellent series when there isn't a lesbian onscreen, and sometimes an excellent series when one is. If TV was actually like that normally I might get one. I actually laughed out loud a lot, which is something I rarely do in real life.
This is also the very first time I've seen a TV version of anything that was much better than the original. TV's usual weaknesses actually balance out Coupland's weaknesses quite well - its ordinary sappiness warms up the coldness of Coupland's novel. Also, working in real time forces Coupland to be more lucid.
Also, I've finally updated my historical blog - only five months late! This one is about Roswell George Mills, the first openly gay man we know of in Canada (in the 1910s).
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(no subject)
Date: 2010-06-01 03:37 am (UTC)And yeah, now I'm disappointed. I'd heard good things about Jpod... not sure if I want to bother to give it time now, though. Sigh. Though, if the series had a bunch of straight guys rushing to jump into bed with gay men, I think it would start to look more like gay porn than anything else. ;-)
(no subject)
Date: 2010-06-08 09:09 am (UTC)(Sorry for taking so long to get back - I somehow missed this on my LJ updates in my e-mail.)