Watching Erica

When watching a TV show, I like to start from the very beginning: Season 1 Episode 1. I don’t like to jump in mid-season, I don’t like to miss episodes, and I don’t like miss any lines of dialogue from chatter in the room. I’m a bit of a snob this way, but I feel that’s the way TV should be enjoyed. This doesn’t mean that every show I watch every show right from the first episode. Many shows I watch casually until I am quickly bored, but only the elite do I watch in their entirety right from the start. A very few select sitcoms have won me over in this regard (Seinfeld, Scrubs, The Office, 30 Rock), and much to my delight a Canadian show found a special place on my DVD rack: Being Erica.

It’s true that the main character, Erica Strange, does not relate to me. I am not female, nor Jewish; I am not desperate for love or struggling with work. Nonetheless, the show with all its quirks (Erica sees a therapist who helps her time-travel to have a 2^nd chance to redo regrets from her past), dialogue featuring many famous quotes from writers, and local Toronto references has made it feel like the show really belongs to this city where I live. My partner’s affinity for the show should also be mentioned – she booked off work one day to go be an extra for the show. Upon her return, we decided that we have to start the show from Season 1, so we went out and bought the DVD to watch together. And that’s where everything went wrong.

A Super Bowl for Everybody

This Sunday, in case you haven’t already heard from the seemingly 24-hour coverage, is Super Bowl Sunday. It is the one ‘holiday’ where everyone can take part and enjoy. The football fans have their excitement coming from the game, of course, but the regular TV viewer is still excited for the alternative sources of entertainment. Sometimes it’s the halftime show, but typically it’s the time for commercials to take centre stage and wow us all. At a cost of $3 Million(!) for a 30-second spot, according to Reuters, the marketing geniuses branding their companies during the game have a lot to live up to. Every year, football fans and non-football fans alike can freely talk about which commercial they found to be the most memorable. Sometimes, it’s shameless over-sexualization of women that the male viewers won’t forget (or upset women). Other times, the commercials tug at our heartstrings when “Mean” Joe Green turns out to be not such a mean guy after all. One thing for sure is that at Super Bowl XLV the three B’s will be present: babes, beer, and beatings.

What To Make of a 3D Future

I was still in Elementary School when my brother came home with Nintendo's new system: the Virtual Boy. As both of us were kids and no amount of dishes we washed could earn us enough to buy a system with a $200 (U.S.) price tag, my brother, genius as he was, was the first kid out of the school doors that day when it was released to at least rent the system. Dubbed as the first "Home 3-D Virtual Reality Experience," players would put their faces into a pair of giant red goggles perched upon a stand, playing games completely coloured in red and black. Besides the obvious problems of having one's face literally directly in the screen forced to see only red lines flying by for however long one decided to play, as an excited naive child, I could look past these problems. What I could not look past, however, was the fact that not only could I not play any game concurrently with my older brother, but more disappointingly for a younger sibling was that I could not see what my big brother was doing while he was playing. The screen was completely blocked from my view, as was the poor design of the system. The Virtual Boy was Nintendo's biggest failure and you'd be hard pressed seeing anyone owning one today, let alone speaking of it, unless they were a collector.

Today, the pursuit of 3-D has enjoyed a sudden resurgence, this time in film and television.