On Tuesday January 8th, CBC TV launches a new comedy series based on Douglas Coupland's popular novel JPod. Set on Canada's west coast in the hotbed of video game design, the novel is a hilarious take on the Google generation. Not to be considered one note, Coupland also lampoons grow ops, businesses that make nothing, the love life of a burger character and oh yes the difficulty of sustaining adult relationships.
The CBC Radio Studio One Bookclub invited listeners to attend a discussion with Doug Coupland and pose their questions to the man who brought us Generation X and JPod.
From Gen X to JPod
Posted by Words At Large Admin on January 02 at 12:00 AM
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Comments
Douglas Coupland how do you do it? How do you capture the pathos and angst of a generation with humour, and needle sharp acuity. Your art is pure genius, I am a huge fan.
Posted by: rose hailstone | January 13, 2008 10:52 AM
CBC how do you do it? How do you constantly take gold and spin it into straw? How do you take the pithy prose of Coupland and reduce it to drek? How do you find actors so wooden that they can drain any sense of humour, irony and style out of well-crafted characters? How did you involve Douglas in the project and still so absolutely miss the mark? Watching this was akin to seeing siblings kiss, I skirmed and skirmed hoping it would get better until I finally had to look away.
Posted by: Drew | January 15, 2008 11:01 AM
I love it when a rich kid from the British Properties who never was going to have to work a McJob in his life makes it! The struggle, the life lessons...brilliant!
Posted by: David | January 26, 2008 01:20 PM
This is incredible (as in "hard to believe/very non-credible") - on Jan 26th, there is a great conversation with Douglas Coupland that is so optomistic and that really discusses how he connects with this usually apathetic and hard-to-reach audience, and not even 8 weeks later, the CBC is announcing the cancellation of the amazing show produced from Mr Coupland's amazing book! Their reason - poor ratings - however thay placed the show on a Friday night, when their own target audience is usually not at home. However that same target audience is downloading, watching, Facebook discussing (there is a jPod group there) and sharing stories about jPod the TV series, and jPod the book! It is indeed hitting the mark, just not in the traditional manner that CBC expects. Why cannot the CBC look back just a few weeks to the optimism displayed in this conversation and give the series more of a chance, while concurrently reexamining their demographic measurement methods?
Posted by: Chris C | March 20, 2008 08:09 AM
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