Tag Archives: tv

Being Erica

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My new favorite TV show is a Canadian series called Being Erica. We just finished watching the first three seasons, and I adore it.

It involves two topics I’m interested in: time travel and therapy. The main character is Erica Strange, a 32-year-old Jewish woman in Toronto who, one day when everything in her life is going wrong, meets a mysterious man who offers to be her therapist. He has Erica write a list of all the regrets from her past, and in each episode he sends her back in time to relive — and try to change — one of those regrets, which usually has some connection or parallel to what’s currently going on in her life. It’s sort of like Quantum Leap meets My Name is Earl.

The show is more than a wish-fulfillment fantasy, though. Erica doesn’t always succeed in changing her past. Sometimes the thing she regrets winds up happening to her in a different way, and sometimes she’s compelled to act the same way she did originally just because of who she is, and sometimes changing the regret leads to unexpected consequences.

Almost every episode makes me think about my own life. I have a few things I really regret, and it’s nice to have the fantasy of being able to go back and change them. But you can’t really change your past. You couldn’t have done things differently than you did: you were who you were at the time, and you had no way of knowing how things would unfold. I wish I hadn’t come out to my parents when I was 19, because they reacted terribly, and I wasn’t prepared to deal with that, and I wound up going back in the closet until I was 24 and wasting the prime sexual years of my life. But there’s no other way it could have happened. My intentions were good: to be open and honest with my parents about something in my life that was important to me. I just had no idea that I was so psychologically ill-equipped to deal with the consequences of telling them.

Anyway…

Being Erica is a terrific show that slowly expands on its premise over three seasons, plays around with its own formula, and goes in unexpected directions.

Erica is played by the immensely appealing Erin Karpluk. The show’s also got a great supporting cast, including the adorable Tyron Leitso, who played the bartender on the unjustifiably short-lived Wonderfalls and who reminds me of a young Matthew Fox.

If you’re interested in time travel, therapy, Canada, Judaism, hot guys, whatever, I totally recommend this show. I hope there’s a fourth season.

Mad Men and Color TV

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On Mad Men, whenever someone is watching TV, the TV screen the character is watching is in black and white. Lately I’ve been wondering: when are we going to start to see characters watch color TV on the show?

On the show right now, it’s the late summer of 1965, which is around the time that color TV really started to take off.

According to Wikipedia, the 1964-65 TV season was the first full season in which NBC broadcast more than 50% of its schedule in color, but most of the shows on ABC and CBS were still in black and white. The 1965-66 season — which Mad Men is about to enter, since the most recent episode took place in August 1965 — was the first TV season in which a majority of prime time shows were in color. By the start of the 1966-67 season, practically every prime time show was in color. Those of us who first experienced the classic 1960s sitcoms through reruns know that weird feeling when you’d somehow run across an early black-and-white episode of Gilligan’s Island or Bewitched or I Dream of Jeannie; each of those shows began in black and white and transitioned to color after its first or second season.

So will we see color TVs on Mad Men soon? Well, even though most programs were in color by the fall of 1965, by 1966 fewer than 10 percent of homes had color TV sets (that chart is located here). It wasn’t until 1972 that a majority of homes had them. But this is Mad Men, where some of the characters are rich corporate types — and Harry Crane is in charge of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce’s TV advertising division, so maybe we’ll see a color TV in his office. That would be neat.

(Update: here’s an in-depth article on “the color revolution of 1965.”)