Writer & Creator talk "Being Erica"

THE EARLY BUZZ for the CBC's new series "Being Erica" (premiering tonight at 9pm) is huge. With notices like this one by the Globe's John Doyle standing up as fairly typical:

Being Erica (CBC, 9 p.m.) is very fine TV drama. It's entertaining, smart, serious and nuanced. It's definitely not silly chick-flick material, which is a relief, though it is obviously intended to please female viewers, especially twenty- and thirtysomethings. It fetishizes high-school experiences a tad too much but, in the three episodes I've seen, there are no letdowns, no segments that feel false. Its strength is that it has an emotional heft that feels authentic, not contrived.

And that means it's not just for those women viewers that CBC lusts after.

That's the kind of review any creative type would lust after. But reviews were still weeks away when I met up with Series Creator Jana Sinyor, and Executive Producer Aaron Martin at a west end Toronto social club that advertises itself as being for artsy types, but every time I go there it's ad knobs and bankers...It was actually refreshing to be there for something where you weren't being muscled by some event for the Fraser Institute.

We were ushered into a dark and cozy screening room, which made for an odd and vaguely Planetarium-like vibe.

I warned Jana and Aaron -- who both spent time on Degrassi: The Next Generation, where Aaron was head writer -- that in Sticks' tradition, this was going to be a crafty kind of interview about the process nitty gritty. They were goodnatured and forthcoming, as they talked about the challenges of taking a pilot to series, nailing and communicating the tone and the essential appeal of the show.

Excerpts from our conversation follow.

DTOS: I remember seeing this pilot back in March, I think. It was a few weeks after I ran into you at the coffee shop before you were going in for a meeting about the potential series. I'm not sure they'd picked it up yet, and when I watched it, I thought, "why was she nervous? This is totally going to get picked up." It really seemed like a world you just wanted to return to. So I'm interested in how that came about.

JS: The first thing is, I've always wanted to go back in time. I love time travel shows. And I was interested in the universality of not being able to hit certain milestones in your life as a woman: meet the guy, get the career going, get pregnant; if you don't meet those milestones you feel like you're falling behind your peers. I knew a lot of women who were attractive, talented, and for whatever reason, just weren't able to find that person, or didn't have a clear and obvious career goal. And I guess I combined those two things.

AM: Jana called me up and said, "I got a pilot, and they want someone to come aboard as sort of a creative partner, and help develop it." The minute I watched the pilot I felt the same way you did, I thought it was really good. So I jumped on board.

DTOS: The whole pilot thing is still pretty new in Canadian drama. We used to just develop and go straight to series. So with the blueprint out there and more developent after, I'm interested to know what changed from Pilot to series?

AM: We kept the core of it, in that she goes back to re-live a past regret. But there's also an ongoing story in the present -- each past visit informs a little of what she's going through in the present day. I think the pilot is weighted more in the past than the series. So in the series, she's facing a problem with her family, or her work life, or her love life, and when she goes back into the past, she finds a problem from her past that's somehow thematically linked. She fixes that, and then applies what she learned to her problem in the present day--

JS: -- And usually the regret, on first blush...it looks like it has nothing to do with the problem in the present.

DTOS: You've got that great fantasy premise. People sometimes get a little squirrelly about that kind of stuff. They start to fear the very thing about the idea that's cool. They get scared of it. How did CBC deal with it?

JS: There was some of that in the beginning, for sure. We really overcame that and wound up feeling really supported in making the show that we wanted to make. Down to putting in some... questionable content in there. Stuff they've never done before on the CBC. The whole mystery of who Dr. Tom [Michael Riley, This is Wonderland, Power Play] is and where he came from, and how he knows so much about Erica...is something we're going to explore over the course of the season, and hopefully future seasons.

AM: When we started out...(laughs)...We went down a road that was sort of 'over-the-top-Time-Travel.' And to their credit, the CBC said, "this isn't the show we want. We don't want all time travel." Our first concept was a really complicated sort of puzzle, all about Erica falling in love with her past....there was this guy in the past that she kept seeing in the present and it actually became way more about Time Travel than what it's now about. And what we wound up saying to the writers is that even though there's this fantastical element -- she's able to travel in time, but everything else in the show has to be grounded in reality. Real emotions, real conversations and situations. And it was CBC who steered us back to that...We had trouble in the first episodes in not really hitting the tone the CBC bought. And it's a hard thing to do. You have to keep the writer trick stuff with the time travel and the past and keep everything else real, and when you read real sometimes on the page it seems really--

JS: --Flat.

AM: -- But it's not flat---

JS: --That's what we want.

AM: And the thing is, we have an incredible actress in Erin Karpuk [who plays the titular Erica Strange] who can take any line that sounds flat and make it sound fun. So I think when we first started up the writing room we were veering off the tone a bit. And it was a process. And we caught it early, and brought it back, and that tone is what Jana set in the pilot -- a real woman's life in her thirties.

JS: There's a desire on the part of writers that sometimes we need to rein in -- specifically on this show, I mean, a desire to "be funny in the writing." Because the way the show works is it's not the writing that's funny, it's more the performer that makes it funny.

AM: The situations are funny. Not the dialogue.

JS: Yeah. So the writing on the page does not end up looking very....funny. (Laughs)

DTOS: But that's not an unusual circumstance with a lot of pilots. They're great and then you try to replicate them and you lose your way a bit...lots of shows go through that. It happens in Hollywood and it happens here, you do a pilot, they say, "that's it, that's the show we want." And then it's hard to replicate that tone at first. Why do you think that is?

JS: I think it's a failure on our part to communicate the tone. I was not as confident at going into this in how well I did know the tone of my own show, and I was more collaborative in my approach saying, "let's find it together." But if you know the tone should be the tone in the pilot, and it's not about going a different way or trying something different..it's really about the ability of those who know the tone to communicate it to everybody else. And as we go through the process we find ourselves able to break it down in more and more specific ways. Like getting really particular about how characters speak, how they don't speak, the way it should look on the page...you don't know how big it is, but it's this huge, invisible thing...it's what makes the show feel like itself.

DTOS: So now, at the end of the first season, what else do you know about the show that you didn't know then?

AM: I think even just structurally, we didn't know then, and we do know now, that you have to go back to the past by the end of Act One. It sounds simple.

JS: (agreeing) Mmm hmm.

AM: But we were like, "sometimes you can go back in Act Two, Act Three." No. You really have to go back in Act One. Sometimes we don't -- and it doesn't make the episode suffer, but...it's just better when we go back in Act One.

JS: We know how to use our characters better. There's that.

DTOS: Do you find yourself writing to the actors more? You know there's that point where the characters are you, they're in your head, and then there's this person playing them and you see what they're really good at. Has that helped you at all? What they're good at and what they're not good at?

JS: It's funny. There are two characters on the show that are easy for everybody to write. Any writer that comes into the department has a really easy time with these two characters. And then, everyone else is more challenging.

AM: The one thing I've found, and not to say Jana is Erica, but I do find myself saying, "how would Jana say this?" Jana is open and says what's on her mind, and Erica says what's on her mind, and it's very hard to write that at times. My first pass on my first episode I'd fall into the trap other writers fell into in not making Erica sound like Erica. And it got to the point where I'd send her scenes and say, "Does this sound like her?" And she'd go "no no no no," -- scratchy, scratchy, scratchy-- [Mimes crossing stuff out.]

So it was a process. And any writer has to go through this when you're taking on someone's vision. You have to make your voice sound like their voice.

JS: And the thing is, now, I think Aaron is actually better at explaining the tone than me. When you create a show it's really easy to make the main character sound like you, because then you just write the way you talk. But you don't realize that it's quite difficult for another person coming in to try and write the way you think and talk. And Aaron is incredbily analytical, and good at figuring out that sort of thing, and breaking it down and explaining it. So he sort of explained the tone of my show back to me in the way that I've never thought of it before, and then went on to explain it to others. In the beginning I was just speaking too generally. I remember you kept sending me the teaser and I kept changing it and you said, "Oh. So Erica never makes jokes. She never says a single funny thing. She's not funny." And I was like, "Yeah! She's NOT funny!" (Laughs)

AM: She's not ironic, she's not cynical, and a lot of things that I think are "go-to" places for writers. Cause it's fun to write people who are fun and ironic. Like Juno, that whole character. That's one of the main problems I had with Juno. I didn't believe her. And whenever we'd try to make Erica sound like that she just became a robot. And even Erin noticed it and didn't like it. She'd say, "I don't think I'd say this, I just don't." And this is early in the process for that. And Erin is a very good bellweather.

JS: She's very similar. Grounded, down to earth, salt of the earth type woman. She's very plain spoken-- which is the character.

AM: I think when you're doing high concept, you have to have very clear rules. Like one of the things we'd ask is, "what is Erica doing wrong that triggers Dr. Tom's visit?" And I don't think we were conscious of that at first, but now we're like, "okay what does she do in Act One that makes him say, "Aha, now you need a session with me.""

JS: And then there's "the false lesson."

AM: (sighs) Yeah. That one's really hard.

By this point, we heard shuffling outside the door, and my digital recorder battery was flashing. So I moved on to give them a chance to step up and make the sale! By answering that all-important-question: Who's the audience? (Beyond that Holy Grail 'women in their thirties?" Sinyor thinks a moment before answering. "Anybody with regrets. Anyone who looks back on something in their past and wonders what life would have been like if they'd made a different choice or taken a different path."

So in a word, I guess....everybody? (We all could use a chance to better identify the "false lesson," methinks.)

JS: It's also nostalgia. We go back a lot to the nineties, which haven't really been done in Time Travel shows. You go back to the 60's, 70's or 80's... But for a lot of people in their 20's, 30's, 40's, the 90's were big for us.

AM: There's a lot of stuff in the 9o's that's really cheesy and funny.

JS: You don't even really know how far we've come til you try to do the 90's every week.

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More from that interview in the weeks to come, when I get around to transcribing it.

A program note. I leave you now for a few days for a bit of a getaway. We'll have a few choice reprints. See you next week.