I've taken to just buying a season/series on dvd, then ripping them to a hard drive.

I get the double whammy of 1) I feel all good and whatnot of making sure the content produces get some money (even if it's realistically, like, 10% of what I payed to get the series), and 2) I have rather high quality masters that I can then rip rather high quality copies to a hard drive.

Also, this is faster than just torrenting the shows at similar quality. (maybe a few days, regardless of the show compared between a day and more than a week, depending on the popularity of the show)