Staying In

Welcome to Being Erica U.S. Premiere Week! To celebrate the show’s second season premiere on SoapNet this Wednesday, Jan. 20, at 10 p.m., I’ve got a trio of interviews. First up is creator Jana Sinyor, who after chatting with me earlier this month about the prospects of a third season, revealed how the show came to be, why Erica is so relatable, Jewish and awesome, and what’s ahead in season two.

If you haven’t caught this Canadian obsession of mine import yet, the entire first season can be found on Hulu.

Note: While season two has already aired in Canada, this Q&A is intended for U.S. viewers who have not seen season two yet. Please put a spoiler warning if you are going to leave a comment about something that happened in season two. Readers, please be aware that there may be spoilers in the comments section.

How did you come up with the idea for the show?

I’m thirty-three now. At the time, I was about thirty when I started thinking about the show. I was hitting a stage in my life where I looked around and I noticed that a lot of my friends were very accomplished in terms of their education. They were attractive and funny and intelligent and yet, there was this feeling that I saw all around. They felt like they were failing if they hadn’t achieved certain things by the time they hit thirty or by the time they were in their late twenties. If they hadn’t found a partner or if they hadn’t found a career that they loved or if they weren’t starting to buy a house or have children, there was a feeling that you’re supposed to be at a certain spot in your life by the time you hit thirty. I just started to really question that. Of course, everybody gets where they get in their own time.

I thought it was interesting and I thought it was something I was seeing a lot of. These women were talented and beautiful and wonderful and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with them except that they put all this pressure on themselves to have achieved these things by this drop dead date. That was really the beginning of how the character of Erica Strange came to be. She’s really based on people I know and trying to make her feel really real is extremely important to me.

The whole idea of the time travel is just something I’ve always really been interested in. Why does time have to go one way? What if we could go back and relive stuff that we’ve done? What would we do differently? It was a marriage of those two areas of interest for me.

She’s a really real and relatable woman despite the fact that she’s a time traveler. Lately, I’ve been looking for heroines that are similar to Erica on TV, but I haven’t been able to find many. Were you inspired by that lack?

I don’t think so. I think that things feeling real is a bit of an obsession for Aaron [Martin, executive producer] and I. It’s a huge thing that we focus on in the show. It’s a starting place for us. Would this really happen? Would someone really say this? There’s an easy go-to place. Characters on TV, a lot of the time, talk in a kind of… It’s sort of like a funny, fake kind of way. You watch it and you think, “That would never really happen.” I have a personal aversion to that way of acting. This isn’t how women in their thirties behave. So often on TV, I’m watching women – I’m a woman in my thirties – and I can’t relate to the things they say. They don’t seem smart to me. It doesn’t seem like they’re thinking things through. We really go very much out of our way and bang our heads against the wall to try – and we fail often – to make her as real as possible in every way.

A lot of adult women characters on television seem to be stuck in high school still.

I agree.

What I like about the show is that it’s a drama. It’s a comedy. It has sci-fi/fantasy elements, but it never feels otherwordly. What was the response like to the time travel element when you were pitching it?

People were very enthusiastic about the show. There was some concern that it not feel too sci-fi, but really, something like this is all in the execution. A show about a woman who time travels done by different people would feel very, very different. We’re going for a very specific, hyper-realistic tone. It was always important to us that it feel like this could really be happening. It’s not just the realism of how Erica is as a person, it’s also sort of that Matrix thing. When you went to see The Matrix, you came out of it feeling like that could really be happening. I really like that. I didn’t want any sort of magic wands. In fact, there’s a few moments in the show that actually work, but at the time that they happened, I was very upset because they felt very magical. Very, very few. Just one or two moments in the show that feel magical. We don’t like them because it goes against what we’re trying to do. We don’t anything that draws attention to the magic. We want it to be very under the radar kind of magic instead of like in your face magic.

But do you ever feel the urge to create more of a mythology around the therapy and the time travel?

There is a huge mythology around it that we tease at and that’s going to be revealed, hopefully, if we do a season three. We got into it a little bit in season two and it’ll be even more expanded upon in season three. That’s definitely the mystery and the mythology of the therapists and what’s going on with them is a big part of some stuff that we’re interested in pursuing.

I’ve been telling all my friends about the show and they’re all getting really into it. One of my friends says that she feels like she’s getting free therapy when she watches the show. Did you intend for it to be so therapeutic and cathartic for viewers?

Yes. That was also really important. We felt dorky when we were first talking about it because it sounds so pretentious. Not that we’re going to help people with a television show, but that we wanted it to be meaningful. If she’s going to go through therapy and she’s going to learn something, what she’s learning has to be worthwhile and it has to be relatable. It has to be stuff that everybody goes through. That’s also something that we put a lot of effort into, making the things that she faces extremely, extremely relatable. We start with conversations. Aaron Martin and I talk about stuff that’s happened to us, to people we know, how we would approach something, and we always look for the real in it. We’re always very gratified when we hear people say, as they do all the time, “This is me. This is my life.” You hear them saying, “I’m Erica. I relate to what she’s going through. That happened to me.” That’s a hugely important part of the show.

At the center of the show is this practicing Jewish family, which you don’t see on TV too often. Why did you decide to make Erica and her family Jewish?

I have a religious studies degree. That’s my sort of original education, was in religious studies. I’m Jewish, but I majored in Christianity. I have always been very, very interested in religion. I feel like there’s a real lack of religion on television. It’s part of the realness thing. Everybody comes from some cultural background. A big thing for us is the universality in the specifics. Universality through specificity. Meaning that, the more specific that we can make Erica, or anybody on the show for that matter, the more universal they feel. Having Erica have a cultural background that is distinct and very real in the sense that she’s not super religious, it’s just what it is. Like everybody, she comes from a cultural background. They’re sort of, I guess, reformed Jews, except for her father, who’s a rabbi. He’s more practicing. Everybody has a religious person in their family and the tensions that come out of having certain people who are more devout and other people who are completely atheist. I feel like that whole aspect of people’s lives is often really cut out of television. You don’t really see it. People don’t really deal with it. Also, my own personal interest made me want to have that be a part of the show.

The season two premiere airs Jan. 20 in the U.S. and it gives viewers their first glimpse of Dr. Tom’s past. He remained a very mysterious figure throughout season one. How did you decide that now was the right time to start to unravel him a little?

In the finale of the previous season, he’s nowhere to be found. In the premiere, we discover that he’s no longer going to be her therapist because he’s quit. It just felt like Erica and he have gone on this journey together. It really just came out of the story. Their relationship came to a crisis and that crisis necessitated us revealing more about Dr. Tom. When we went back and reviewed season one, we felt like we hadn’t fleshed out the characters enough outside of Erica – it’s still her show – and that makes them not very interesting. When you don’t flesh out characters, it’s hard to care about them. We made a concerted effort to get more into some of those other characters. Some we succeeded with better than others, looking back on the season. It’s something we’ll continue to do even more of in season three. Dr. Tom is a really interesting character who we didn’t know much about and there’s stuff to know about him. There’s a whole bunch of stuff to know about him. We decided it was time to start revealing it.

Do you know who or what he is? Is that something you’ve planned out?

Oh yeah. I know everything. I know what’s happening in season four. You have to know. Otherwise, it’s hard to figure out what you’re supposed to do next. The stuff that comes up in season two is stuff that we knew about Dr. Tom in season one. That stuff gets further explored as you go down the line. There’s some stuff that comes to you that is new and you’re excited and you try to figure out a way to incorporate it. But for the big, big things like Dr. Tom, I know. You gotta know from the beginning kind of thing.

In the season premiere, we also get a glimpse of a new character, Kai. Who is he and how integral is he to Erica’s journey this season?

He’s quite integral to Erica’s journey. There’s going to be a whole sort of reveal about him and who he is and their connection. How they’re going to end up connecting. I think it’s quite interesting. I think it’s quite unexpected. It’s something that we were very excited about going into season two – the introduction of that new character.

What can you share about what’s going on in Erica’s professional life this season and the world of River Rock?

Erica’s been promoted to Junior Editor. She’s got Katie’s book, The None, that’s she working on. She’s also going to be getting a new title that’s going to be very exciting for her and that’s going to dominate her work life for the duration of the season. We’re going to see a lot more stuff happen at River Rock in a different way. We also really expanded those characters and Erica’s relationship with them quite successfully, I think, in season two. So a lot more Julianne and Brent and especially Friedken.

Check back tomorrow for my Q&A with Erica herself, Erin Karpluk.