The acting overall was good, with some great laugh out loud moments. Cowboy gave me some good laughs, especially when he tried to deny frequenting a website about hugging. Alan Thicke is a bit awkward as the father. I hope he can ease up on the fromage in future episodes. David W. Kopp was great as Ethan, suitably average but with geek flair orbiting him at all times. He plays the straight man in contrast to the abundance of comic relief, being the island of sanity in an otherwise absurd show.

The pop art interludes are a nice touch, being visual (and in my opinion better) versions of the ones in the book. After Kaitlin reveals that she’s from Florida, an interlude appears showing a Florida orange with snow falling on it, alluding to how frosty Kaitlin is to the other reluctant members of JPod. Cute.

The episode flew by at a fast pace, like most of Coupland’s books, and the closing scene left me wanting more. Finally, I’ve got something to watch on Tuesday nights! I recommend JPod to all geeks and programmers, and their family and friends who want a glimpse of what we do. It’s good enough to pull me away from my laptop for an hour, and that’s saying a lot!

(Confession: I had my laptop on my lap throughout the entire episode. I have no editor, so I'm not changing that last line.)

Now, time to play some Bonobo records.

I actually like the idea of seasons consisting of 8 episodes, or some other small number. It forces the plot to be concise and focused. Why not air short-season series like Traveler in the summer? Or in the fall, when shows like Lost and American Idol don't air?

Traveler could continue to have mini-seasons like this one. It is billed as an action-adventure show, so short seasons would be a perfect fit. It's hard to stretch a show to 24 episodes when it's supposed to be action-packed and fast-paced in every episode. The DVD sets for such small seasons would be priced much cheaper, since it could fit on two discs instead of six or seven. Easy money!

DiGillio's blog mentions some fans trying to save the show Jericho-style, but I'm not holding my breath. Still, it shows that the blogosphere has gained some influence over other forms of media. So here I am trying to do my tiny part.

Anyway, I guess that means there are only two more episodes of Traveler before it's time to find another new show due for cancellation.

TVShows lets you subscribe to the shows that you want to watch. It will automatically find the torrents for those programs and use your default BitTorrent client to download them in the background. Without any effort on your part, your shows will arrive on your computer. As a bonus, the shows are commercial free! So far, I have been very happy with the video quality of the shows I've been downloading. Since everyone who has subscribed to a show will start downloading at roughly the same time, the speed of the torrent download can be extremely fast. But if you insist on watching shows the same day that they air, you might be disappointed. For less popular shows, it can take a day before the download completes. Still, once you break free of the TV schedule, you may not care about watching shows a day or two later than you used to.

Just let the shows get downloaded to your computer, and when you’ve had your fill of video games, if that should ever happen, you can see how many shows you’ve got waiting for you. It’s nice to have a week’s worth of Colbert Report waiting for me on the weekend. I’m often not interested in his guests, so I can skip the interviews, reducing the length of each episode to around 15 minutes. That’s a lot of time saved that can be better spent on games, books, blogging, and even going outside! (Probably in that order.)

I have been watching On The Lot this way, and can’t imagine watching it the old-fashioned way. Like other reality shows, the show tries to cause suspense by pausing and filling time with biographies of the contestants and other stuff I can’t bear watching. I can watch an episode of On The Lot in about 25 minutes now. No longer do I have to suffer mean-spirited tricks like when the host says, “The person who is going home this week is... coming up right after this!” When commercials are intentionally inserted into the middle of a sentence, I don’t feel bad downloading commercial-free versions of the show.

If you’ve got a TiVo or other PVR, then you already know how nice it is to watch TV this way. But with TVShow, you don’t need a cable TV subscription, and you're not limited by geography. Want to watch a British show that hasn't made it to your country yet ? Subscribe to it in TVShows! Once you’ve got a way to deliver those downloaded shows to your TV, then you’ve got it made. Television networks had better start adapting fast before this trend takes off. Crying foul and calling people thieves won’t be good enough.