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.