It's actually pretty simple if all you want to do is download files.
Get a good bittorrent program - I'd recommend uTorrent from
http://www.utorrent.com/ it's free, it's teeny, and it's very good, with excellent online help pages. Mostly you don't have to make any changes to its settings, or to anything else, apart from telling it where you want files to download on your PC - the exception is if you have a hardware firewall as part of a modem or router, you may need to get into the settings for that enable something called "pnp handshaking", which means that your computer tells the firewall to give you a fast channel - if you don't do that, it will run very slowly.
Once you've got it installed you need to find what they call a seed - this is a small file that begins the download. A good place for current TV shows is an italian site (english language), eztv
http://eztv.it/ Find the show you want, by looking at e.g. the show list (link at the top), then click on the show's name and it will show you the episodes that are available. For example, if you wanted an episode of NCIS you click on NCIS and see that they've got links to most of season 7 and some earlier episodes. You find the episode you want and look across to the right to see an icon for downloading it - in the case of eztv there will usually be at least three representing different mirror sites that have the seed. Click on one and uTorrent will show you a list of what's in the torrent (usually the episode only, sometimes also a preview file or a readme with some information about it). Once you've clicked OK the rest is pretty much automatic - if you have a fast internet connection it can be incredibly fast with a really recent show that has thousands of people downloading it, e.g. ten or fifteen minutes for an episode, much slower if you're getting older stuff.
Remember that this is two way traffic - any bits of the file you've downloaded are available for download from others, so after a while you might see that the file is downloading at 300K and uploading at 10K. All that takes a lot of bandwidth, anything else you want to do on line will run very slowly.
It's considered good etiquette to let torrent programs continue to "seed" (upload) your download for an hour or two after you've finished.
Things to watch out for - eZtv seem to check files for problems before making them available, a lot of the other sites don't. Usually there will be some indication if there are problems, e.g. someone posts a comment saying the file is corrupt or has bad sound.
Hope this helps.
