Few things rattle a TV viewer's cage like a show unjustly culled before its time. They hold vigils, wage nut warfare; some hardy souls even buy the DVD. One such prematurely axed cult favourite, jPod, makes its way to British screens this week.
jPod, CBC's adaptation of the Douglas Coupland novel, which spent last year battling falling ratings and abysmal handling by the network, is now available on Virgin's On Demand service. Flying under everyone's radar, it was the best show of 2008 that no one saw.
Set in Vancouver videogame company Neotronic Arts, the show follows the inhabitants of the titular jPod (an office where everyone's surname begins with J due to a Y2K glitch). Strange things are afoot in jPod. The podsters look to make history with the most sickeningly violent video game conceivable: BoardX, a spectacularly heinous skateboard slasher game that makes Grand Theft Auto look like Sonic the Hedgehog.
Naturally, history is never made without conflict, and they must incorporate idiot executive Steve's cuddly Dwight the Turtle character into all the gore and mayhem. Needless to say, things don't end well for Dwight.
But the fun really begins with the podsters' private lives. Ethan, the series protagonist, has a white-collar dope-dealing mother, a philandering ballroom dancing father and an increasingly fraught relationship with Kam Fong, a Chinese mobster. Cowboy, the genius coder of the crew, deals with sex and cough-syrup addiction, and an obsession with death – an understandable hangover from his parents' murder-suicide when he was 10.
Then there's Bree, the Chinese-Canadian control freak who dates John Doe, twentysomething virgin and improbably gifted Zen master of cunnilingus. Feeder boyfriends, biker gangs and lesbian communes also make appearances. Oh and there's the odd killing, too.
If you like pacey, sharply scripted drama, punctuated by horrific CGI violence, then it is definitely worth your time. While it's true that we will never see a season two and the show is as dead as Dwight the Turtle, bear in mind that much TV viewing is about honouring the dead. We keep their names alive and testify to the bad scheduling and lacklustre promotion that killed them. We pass down these tales, in the hope that some wisdom seeps through to the networks, letting them know that sometimes nurturing the slow burners is the smartest thing they can do.
If it means one new season from the likes of Pulling, Arrested Development or Firefly, it will all be worth it.
