When you think about the main benefits of living in Canada, most people are inclined to mention things like the relatively low level of violent crime, universal healthcare, or the never-ending opportunities to make a beaver joke. These are all fine and dandy, but today I'm quite pleased to be Canadian because of the fact that we all apparently know one another. Don't believe me? Well, one day I happened to mention to a friend (
hi Kendra!) that I liked a particular TV show, she then mentioned to me that she knew someone who worked on it, and less than a week later, I'm sitting in a cute Leslieville cafe with
Being Erica writers and executive producers,
Aaron Martin and
Jana Sinyor.
I call it the
Two Degrees of Kevin Canadian Bacon.
So, who exactly are these kind people who have generously allowed me to fangirl in their presence?
Jana Sinyor is the creator, writer and executive producer of
Being Erica. Jana started out on small projects, including a brief stint working on
Sesame Park before graduating from the
Canadian Film Centre. Her agent's assistant later connected her with Aaron Martin who brought her on to story edit
Degrassi: The Next Generation in 2002. She eventually became more involved in the series, notably penning "U Got the Look" - an episode known to fans as "The One About Manny's Thong." Sticking to the teen genre, Jana went on to create
Dark Oracle, a show about 15-year old twins who realize they can distort reality through a comic book. After the show's cancellation, Jana was keen to do a show that featured time-travelling, but she originally envisioned the lead character as a 13-year old girl who went back in time through a painting in her grandmother's house. The owners of
Temple Street Productions,
David Fortier and
Ivan Schneeberg, encouraged her to craft a more adult show instead - and with their input,
Being Erica was born.
Here's some pop culture trivia on Jana:
Favourite Female TV Character: Buffy Summers of
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Favourite Male TV Character: Jimmy McNulty from
The Wire
Favourite TV Show (no longer airing): A tie between
Freaks and Geeks and
Star Trek: The Next Generation
Favourite TV Show (still airing): Doesn't have one. She actually (*gasp*) doesn't watch much TV nowadays ("I like hanging out with my family, my children, I like to sample lots of different ethnic foods, and I spend a whole lot of time reading what people online say about
Being Erica.")
Most Overrated TV Show: See above.
Reality Show She Could See Herself On: Beauty and the Geek (as the geek)
Movie She Could Watch A Million Times: Girl, Interrupted,
Labyrinth, BBC's
Pride and Prejudice
Favourite Time Travelling Story in Pop Culture: The Time Traveler's Wife
Person Whose Brain She'd Love To Pick: She said it would be impossible to pick one, so Aaron suggested she choose
Justin Bieber.
Aaron Martin is the writer and executive producer of
Being Erica. Also a graduate of the Canadian Film Centre's writing program (class of '00), Aaron's career in television took off when he signed on to develop stories for
Degrassi: The Next Generation in 2001. He quickly rose up the ladder with the show, eventually becoming an executive producer for the series while continuing to write episodes. In 2007, he was ready to graduate from teenville and went on to create the college-based drama,
The Best Years. Keen to work in the States (and he still is -*hint* *hint* - to all those network heads who
surely read this blog), Aaron also wrote a pilot episode for NBC ("basically, it was Sleeping Beauty waking up in 2008 - sort of like
Enchanted, but not.") however the writer's guild strike and the business being what it is derailed things. As luck would have it, he got a call from Jana who was looking for someone she could partner with to write
Being Erica and he took up the opportunity.
Here's some pop culture trivia on Aaron:
Favourite Female TV Character: Buffy Summers of
Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Starbuck from
Battlestar Galactica
Favourite Male TV Character: Dexter Morgan from
Dexter
Favourite TV Show (no longer airing): Buffy the Vampire Slayer and
Rome
Favourite TV Show (still airing): True Blood
Most Overrated TV Show: Glee
(he thought of that answer instantly, he truly hates that show)
Reality Show He Could See Himself On: The Amazing Race
Movie He Could Watch A Million Times: The Sound of Music
Favourite Time Travelling Story in Pop Culture: A Wrinkle in Time
Person Whose Brain He'd Love To Pick:
Joss Whedon or
J.J. Abrams
So - onto the show!
If you haven't been introduced to Being Erica, be sure to enter my contest for a chance to win Being Erica: Season One on DVD
- details are after the interview. But in the meantime, here's the gist:
Erica Strange (
Erin Karpluk) is a woman in her early 30s who feels like a failure. Despite being smart, attractive, and educated - Erica's given up on her dreams of being a writer, has just been canned from a dead-end customer service job (which is a huge contrast to her younger sister's successful career as a surgeon), and has a string of unsuccessful relationships. The people around her seem to keep moving along while Erica seems ... stuck. Knowing what I do about people who have Masters degrees in English Literature (Erica's big accomplishment), that all sounds about right.
After a particularly heinous day, she meets Dr. Tom (
Michael Riley), a man who offers to become her therapist and help her work through some of the issues she's having. Little does she know, Dr. Tom is no average shrink. When, as instructed by Dr. Tom, she compiles a list of her regrets in life, Erica suddenly finds herself transported back to high school - living in her teenage body but equipped with her present-day, 32-year old mind - and just in time to relive or fix one of the humiliations on her list. As you can imagine, things don't go too smoothly. Despite this, when Erica returns to the present, she agrees to continue therapy with Dr. Tom - an opportunity that includes going back in time to address the rest of her regrets (if that were me, you
didn't ask? First stop would probably be
Picture Day, 1986). By revisiting different points in her past (everything from her disappointing Bat Mitzvah party to a pivotal moment at a dot com venture), Erica inevitably learns lessons that apply to her current situation and she eventually begins to craft the life she wants (but not without its share of ups and downs, of course). The show is a one-hour drama-comedy-sci-fi series, all set in Toronto.
Schooled? OK, on with the interview, already!
Jen: So, you went from a story about a time-travelling 13-year old to a show about a time-travelling 32-year old. Was it tough to make that leap?
Jana: Once it was presented to me, I realized that I was really interested in this thing where you hit your late thirties or your late twenties and if you haven’t succeeded with the job, the family, the partner – you feel like you’re failing by not hitting certain milestones by a certain age. The idea of a woman who is funny and smart and attractive and educated who seems to have all these things going for but feels like she’s failing because she hasn’t achieved things in the way she and society have told her she must achieve, felt really universal to me and interesting and something I was seeing happening all around me. So, we married that to the time travel concept and it really went from there.
Jen: It seems like every time Erica goes back to fix a regret, she doesn’t necessarily accomplish what she thinks she’s going to do. Often times, the original end result occurs anyway, just sometimes in a more round-about way. Is that a statement on fate?
Aaron: We play with fate a bit – show some alternative realities – like Adam has one where he’s married to Beatrice and Erica has one where she’s rich. But mainly, we’ve written things that way because we want the dramatic thrust of the show to focus on the present than the past. So, it’s not about going to the past to fix your problems, it’s about going back to the past to learn from your problems, and bringing those lessons to fix her current issues.
Jenprah Winfrey: Perhaps that’s why a lot of people relate to the show – because, like Erica, they can’t or don’t actually change their pasts, they can only face their mistakes, try to learn from them and move forward.
Aaron: Right. Your life is going to be limited if you let your regrets define you. Instead, you have to learn from them, put those hang-ups behind you and move on.
Jen: Has that really resonated with viewers?
Jana: Oh, yah. We hear it all the time. That’s the major feedback we get from the show.
Jen: I’ve heard people describe watching Being Erica like it’s as if they’re getting their own little therapy session.
Jana: I’ve heard that too. People have told me that the show has changed their lives – and it’s lovely. People get very heartfelt about it. They really relate to Erica. Like, some people have told me the show has helped them solve their own problems, and some people wish their own therapist was more like Dr. Tom.
Aaron: We also strive to entertain people, of course. *Laughs* But one thing that has always been really important to us is that the show feels realistic, even with this time-travel element to it.
Jen: Where do you get a lot of your viewer feedback?
Aaron: Our friends are very vocal. They watch and they definitely let us know what they think of it.
Jana: People e-mail. People
Facebook.
Aaron: There’s a
LiveJournal site we look at.
Television Without Pity.
Twitter.
Jana: Well, sometimes you get consensus. Like, sometimes nearly everyone feels the same way about something and when that happens, you have to pay attention to that, I think.
Aaron: A good example from this year was episode seven, “Jenny From the Block.” It got a really big, positive response, which surprised us because we thought it was the weakest episode of the season. For a lot of people, it was their favourite. And that really made us think.
Jana: We reconnected this season with what people really liked about the show to begin with. Seeing the response to that episode helped us. But it’s often very individual. Like, there’s the whole Kai / Adam situation this year. Some people really love Adam, some love Kai. Some people really want Erica to be single.
Jen: The show has been picked up by a few international distributors and networks – has the knowledge that it’s being seen elsewhere, like Britain and Brazil and the States, impacted the show at all?
Aaron: We only get notes from the CBC, and that’s really all we concern ourselves with. The thing is, different countries and cultures respond differently to some of the subject matter – so from what I understand, they’ll sometimes edit the show quite a bit before it airs there. Degrassi was the same thing. It was often too much for American broadcasters, and yet, it was what got us a lot of attention down there.
Jen: Has there been any pressure to turn down the “Torontoness” of the show?
Jana: No, no, no. If anything, we crank it up. Toronto is a huge part of our show. We go out of our way to mention things like the 401 or Scarborough Town Centre or Casa Loma. The show is aggressively Toronto.
Aaron: We purposefully set a lot of scenes in highly identifiable areas of Toronto. We want to make Toronto look beautiful. It’s not just a stand-in for an American city. It’s one of the biggest cities in North America.
Random Comment: Want more proof of my Two Degrees of Canadian Bacon theory? Erica’s home – an apartment building on Palmerston – is actually where my friend (an old high school boyfriend, to be precise) and his girlfriend live. They feel slightly ripped off that inside of their apartment is nowhere as roomy as the one on Being Erica.
Jen: Being Erica is being remade for a British audience. Do you have any input in that? Do you want any? Are you OK with having your character in someone else’s hands?
Jana: Nope – no real input. It’s being made for that other culture so I think it really does have to handled by someone who is immersed in that culture. I mean, if being Erica was being made for Egypt, should I really have input in how the portrayal is done? Our Erica is distinctly Canadian. I couldn’t imagine someone writing her, on a Canadian show, for a Canadian audience, who didn’t thoroughly understand what it’s like to be Canadian. So, when it comes to adapting the story for other markets, I think the same is true
Jen: Not only are you writers, but you’re also executive producers. What does that mean when it comes to what you do on the show?
Aaron: We’re show runners – but we don’t have anything to do with the money side of things. Basically all creative decisions get filtered through us.
Jana: We’re the creative gods of the show, to put it really crassly and bluntly, but that’s the best way of explaining it. We direct the show creatively in every sense. What the sets are going to look like to what people are going to wear – we don’t buy the wardrobe or anything, but we are the creative vision.
Jen: As much as that’s in your control – have there been things you’ve had to fight for creatively? Have any of your stories or suggestions received pushback from Temple Street or the CBC?
Aaron: When we do some of the more out-there stories, there’s always some concern about what we’re doing – and we ensure them that they can trust us that we’re not going to make it weird and unwatchable.
Jana: But we’ve always felt very supported – really the most in my entire career.
Aaron: Oh, yes, by far.
Jana: Like, they let us do things that they’re afraid of, it’s clear that they’re afraid.
Aaron: Definitely stuff that you wouldn’t do on broadcast in the US. And this is a network, broadcast show, just in Canada, and they let us do things like …
Jana: Anal rape.
Aaron: Finding your boyfriend masturbating.
Jana: Stuff that’s typically more cable.
Jen: I did noticed way more swearing and sexuality this year than in previous seasons.
Jana: The swearing was from Adam probably.
Aaron: It’s kind of hard to have a character like that without a swear word or two in there.
Jana: We write them as real people – and real people curse. Real people are sexual. If we didn’t have any of that in the show, we wouldn’t be writing honestly about these characters.
Jen: When you’re writing an episode together, how does that normally work? Is one of you more of a dialogue person and the other is more of a story person? Or are there certain characters that you each kind of own?
Aaron: When it comes to co-writes, we both have strengths and weaknesses so we balance each other out. Like, I’ve never written a voiceover for the show. I don’t know how to write them – Jana writes all the voiceovers.
Jana: And I don’t do the comedy. Like Julianne and Brent and Friedken and all that – that part of the show is very much Aaron’s voice.
It works well to write about the things that you have the experience in or that you relate to. It makes the process go faster and better. When we’re co-writing, we’ll skip scenes – like the super emotional scenes he’ll usually leave for me, and the comedic scenes, I’ll leave for him. When we’re writing individually, we usually really struggle with those scenes that are outside our usual expertise, and half the time the other comes in and rewrites it anyway.
Aaron: Lots of times I’ll write a very female-centric scene like a guy, and Jana will be like, “this is NOT how a woman would say that!”
Jana: For me, the same thing goes for comedies … and sometimes the guys.
Aaron: Yes – I’ll tell her, “those guys are emoting too much. Use less words.”
Jana: But we’re both getting better and learning from each other.
Aaron: We both write much better because of this show.
Jen: Which character is the most fun to write for?
Aaron: Julianne. She just says what’s on her mind.
Jana: That’s for him. Julianne’s really hard for me. I guess Erica is the most natural character for me to write – because we’re somewhat similar, I can draw from a lot of my own thoughts. I also like writing Dr. Tom, even though he’s probably the toughest character to write for. When you do a good job with a Dr. Tom scene, it’s really rewarding.
Jen: What makes writing Dr. Tom so tough?
Jana: He’s really different from anyone on the show.
Aaron: That was the hardest person for me to write for at the start. He’s always talking in metaphors. He often has to get a point across without actually saying it outright to Erica. It can be hard to do that.
Jana: He’s sometimes sarcastic, sometimes mean, sometimes compassionate – and always holding something back.
Jen: Is there a character you relate to the most on the show?
Aaron: I love Julianne. I pick her. *Laughs*
Jana: Well, Erica – in many ways, obviously. She’s my age, she grew up in the same part of the city I did, she’s Jewish like me. On a superficial level I have a lot in common with her.
Aaron: But there’s a lot that Jana is that Erica isn’t. By the time this show came around, Jana had already had kids, she had a good career – sort of the anti-Erica.
Jana: In terms of writing her, though, and understanding what she’s thinking – I get it. If you’re going to write a show, make the lead a character that’s the easiest for you to write.
Jen: Jana, are you often asked if you’re Erica?
Jana: YES. It’s probably the question I get the most. I’m not Erica. Everyone, please stop asking me that. *Laughs*
Jen: Have you ever pulled directly from your lives or from conversations you’ve had with friends and family? Are any of the stories in Being Erica mostly true ones?
Jana: Oh, yes. We’ve even used peoples’ actual first and last names in the show.
Both Aaron and Jana look at each other and laugh. There’s clearly a few inside jokes going on within the scripts of Being Erica.
Jana: Well, we tend not to do things so that they’re so specific that they and their entire families will recognize it’s them. Actually, a lot of the time people think we’ve been inspired by their lives when we actually had no idea that what was happening in the show was something they also experienced. It goes back to the universality of a lot of the issues we explore in
Being Erica.
Aaron: But, everyone’s named after someone we know, even if it doesn’t match their character. I used Kendra (our mutual friend) for Claire’s best friend who brings stripper poles to parties.
I laugh, envisioning our Kendra doing the same - especially seeing as she's been invited to a cocktail party we're throwing this month.
Jana: And Ivan and Dave – our gay couple on the show who own Goblins? They’re named after our fellow executive producers from Temple Street, Ivan Schneeberg and David Fortier.
Aaron: A lot of people now think they’re a couple. *Laughs* They’re close, but not that close. They’re both married with children.
Jana: Well, there’s also Brent. That was the most extreme one we did – and we so did not ask for his permission, in fact, we kind of made fun of him. Brent - the real one - is a very well known talent agent in the industry. And he’s a gay straight man.
Jen: Ok! I need clarification! Brent is STRAIGHT?
Jana: Yes. He’s a straight man.
I’ve only just met Jana, so I’m not sure if that's sarcasm I'm reading.
Jen: No, really? Like, he’s straight-straight? Because I never, ever would have thought that.
Aaron: He is 100% straight. We’ve shown him hitting on women throughout the show – just in a very gay way.
Jen: Ok – I’ll take your word on that. Besides developing characters, you’re also developing the big story. When you establish the show’s arc – do you do that together?
Aaron: Yep – we’re doing that right now, actually, for season four – should we have one.
Aaron shows me a piece of lined paper where he’s drawn a line to represent the series continuum, with characters jotted down and ideas of what will happen along the way. I’d officially make the worst spy ever because I really didn’t catch anything besides – sarcastic spoiler alert – the names “Erica” and “Dr. Tom”. Way to go, Jen.
Jen: How far along have you thought about the show? Have you pretty much plotted out Erica’s entire journey?
Aaron: There’s been one thing that we’ve known all along, and that’s the end point – how the series will wrap, but that’s mainly it. Her life is evolving and we follow Erica and what makes sense for her. Like, at one point, when we started the series, we thought she wanted to become an author herself, and it doesn’t feel like that anymore.
Jana: Plus, you get inspired by certain performers or by things you see happening around you, or by things that we become interested in, and we put those in the show. So, we’re really not locked down, season to season, except in the most broad strokes way.
Aaron: The ultimate goal is for her to be happy and fulfilled.
Jana: We’re committed to seeing her evolve and grow and become braver, stronger, happier.
Jen: It sounds like her journey might be cut short, though. In season three, Kai returns from the future and vaguely references that in 2019, there will be a major disaster to hit Toronto, one that causes many people die. Is it Rob Ford’s doing? Jana and Aaron: YES. *Laugh*
Oh, jokes are fun. It’s a joke, right?
Jana: We can’t reveal much about that yet, obviously. Aaron and I are talking now about what happens and how, but should we have a season four, it will be explained then.
Jen: Does that mean you’re not sure about a season four? I see you’re working on it, so ... ?
Aaron: We’ve got eight scripts that we’re working on now and we’re operating as if the show will come back, but we won’t know officially until January. So, for us, it’s still at the story and idea stage.
UPDATE (02/14/2011): Being Erica has officially been renewed for a fourth season!
Jen: The third season finale is this Wednesday. Will it be a cliffhanger? Will we get some answers?
Jana: You’ll just have to wait and see.
Jen: That’s the worst.
Aaron: I think the finale explains a lot.
Jen: Oooh!
Jana: And asks more questions.
Jen: Ugggghhh…
Being Erica's season three finale is Wednesday, December 8th, 9PM EST on CBC. A Being Erica holiday special - sadly not in claymation - will be airing on December 15th, 9PM EST on CBC. Viewers in the US can look forward to the season three premiere of Being Erica on Wednesday, January 26th at 11PM EST on SOAPNet.
Now, the prize giveaway! If you comment below (about anything you want) - you're automatically entered in a draw for a chance to win Being Erica: Season One on DVD. When you comment, please be sure to include something in your message (your e-mail, log in to Blogger) so that I can track you down should you win. PLUS! You can also enter (or get a bonus entry if you already commented) if you tweet a link to this blog post (Such as: "Check out this DVD giveaway and interview with the writers from Being Erica: http://bit.ly/gUDuWm")! One winner will be selected randomly from all entries. Contest closes on Thursday, December 9, 2010 at 9PM EST. Good luck!
UPDATE: And the winner has been announced!
Read more...
(the book)
Posts
