Becoming Erica
BY Matthew Hays
As Jana Sinyor tells it, the idea for Being Erica arrived as she observed what seemed like an entire generation dealing with an expectations crunch. “I was interested in the fact that I was meeting women, and some men too, who were bright and educated and funny, and attractive – who for whatever reason were in their late 20s or early 30s and up against this wall of expectations,” says the show’s creator. “If they didn’t have certain things in place–the career, the house, the children–people had this mass anxiety. I was interested in the universality of that, how prevalent it was.”
Now that Being Erica has been declared one of the standouts of the past season, Sinyor, with showrunner Aaron Martin and the rest of the cast and crew, are dealing with expectation crunches of their own. When the first season began airing, the reviews were unanimously solid, perhaps best reflected by the Globe and Mail’s declaration that it was “simply magnificent.” It was the kind of flurry of press attention and adulation that creative types dream about.
And that attention was matched by audience enthusiasm – something fostered through good word of mouth and furthered via an interactive website (launched before the show premiered). “It’s been great to get reviews like these,” Sinyor confirms. “From both Canadian and American reviewers.” Simply put, Being Erica struck a chord. It tapped into the zeitgeist, and though there’s no scientific reasoning as to why a show connects with a broad audience, the show’s combination of life lessons, comedy, drama and a time-travel premise caught on.
It’s certainly a shot in the arm for Sinyor et al. But as she recalls it, enthusiasm for the concept is nothing new. Back in 2006, her idea immediately raised interest at both Temple Street Productions and at the CBC. “Actually, the original idea was about a little girl who goes into the past through a painting,” Sinyor recalls. “But it ended up morphing into the story of a young woman and an hour drama. That’s what the CBC was looking for.”
The set-up for Being Erica allows for a broad range of plot scenarios. In the pilot, we meet a beleaguered Erica, a woman who, at 30, doesn’t seem to have the things everyone around assumes she might have had by now. She’s pretty, smart, university educated and ambitious. But Erica has no husband, no children, no house, and no hot career. The character grew from Sinyor’s observations of so many young people who were hitting their 30s: “I found a lot of people were being really hard on themselves. So this character was not where she had thought she’d be at this point in her life. And that leads to the question: if you’re not where you want to be, who do you blame? And if you blame yourself, why?”
Sinyor came up with a twist, a high concept that would allow the writers to examine Erica’s life through her past. “I really like magic realism, and love the idea of bringing a magical element to things. So I thought we could look at the things that happen in her past through things that are happening in her present. This opens up a bit of wish fulfillment–everyone would like to go back and change a few things. We all have regrets.”
Thus was hatched the essential concept of the show. Each week, Erica meets with her therapist (played by Michael Riley), who gives Erica the power to time travel back to a moment she feels is somehow responsible for her current situation.
Being Erica is somewhat genre-defiant. There are moments of fun and whimsy (enhanced by Erin Karpluk, who showcases a powerful comic sensibility in the lead), poignant drama and therapeutic life lessons–all wrapped up in a time-travel device. “But the idea was that this would never be like sci-fi,” says Sinyor.
“We wanted this to feel real,” adds Martin. “The show feels like a lot of things because real life is like that–comic one moment, dramatic the next.” But for the show to feel real, Sinyor and Martin realized that their central character was utterly crucial. Erica had to be an ordinary everywoman, a person anyone could identify with. And keeping Erica down to earth was imperative to maintain the realism that keeps the entire show grounded.
“It’s a battle, because you have to keep the dialogue realistic,” says Martin. “Being writers, you sit down and come up with a funny line,” says Sinyor. “But you can’t always go all the way with your funny stuff here. It’s often quite ordinary, which means holding yourself back if you’re a comedy writer. How many people are constantly funny in real life? Do people repeatedly come up with zingers and one-liners? That’s not how people talk – so that’s not how we write the character of Erica.”
