Being Erica How, Exactly?

JAIME WEINMAN FROM Macleans picks up on the CBC's not-very-well-hidden flop sweat terror about promoting their new time-twisted comic drama Being Erica, which debuts this Monday at 9pm on CBC, (in The Border's former timeslot.)

This show is going for the same demographic as Sophie, but the promotional blitz for Sophie made the premise fairly clear. But Erica’s posters and tag lines don’t really tell you much of anything except that she’s “going back” to set things right — but the fact that the show is a time travel fantasy where she literally goes back in time to correct things in her past (call it a more self-centred version of Quantum Leap) is not obvious at all, at least in the print ads...

Networks, both U.S. and Canadian, sometimes seem to have this kind of reticence when promoting a show with a fantasy element; ...

I don’t know if it helps or hurts a show to soft-pedal the supernatural stuff, but I admit that it is very tricky to promote a show that has a fantasy aspect but otherwise aims to be realistic, like Life On Mars. The whole “magic realism” form seems to be more accepted in books, as well as movies like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. But most TV shows are either “pure” fantasy or not.

Anything that muddies the hook of your show is a problem. The perceived solution (hide the premise) is so much worse than the problem it's trying to fix that I can't even imagine the thinking that goes into it. If people don't watch the show it won't be because of the premise. This is not spaceships in space shooting lasers. It's Peggy Sue Got Married.

None of this is new, of course. We talked about it on the blog last year. (And Weinman's covered the ground too, I believe.)

When you lose the clarifying ability of genre -- when you try to hide it, you lose sight, I think, of the mechanics of what you're doing -- and everything becomes softer and more slippery. If you're trying to run away from what kind of show it is, then how can you honestly talk about what needs to be in the show to reach -- never mind the audience that you want to trick into watching -- but the audience who would be predisposed to watch anyway?

In the network hallways, that leads to some frustrating conversations where they buy a sci-fi concept, and then fall over backwards trying to hide the sci-fi in it. You know how hard that is to write? Very.

Because there are certain expectations people have in watching sci-fi product, whether it's called that or not. Can you imagine a soap opera without any sex, either actual or implied? What about a murder mystery where they said, "maybe we should think twice about having a body." But these straitjackets are applied to sci-fi shows all the time. You get notes that just aren't consistent with the genre -- there's no sense making a Six Feet Under observation in a show that's just not built that way. You find yourself getting notes that you can't take -- because you have the wrong premise, the wrong characters, the wrong sets. And all this comes out of the idea that it's okay to buy one kind of show and then say you're going to make another.

In the end, the reason why a lot of sci-fi product winds up being anemic, dull, or retreaded and bled of creativity is because in that development process, you have the people paying the piper begging writers to run away from the thing that is the very essence of the show.

It's a shame that CBC has finally taken a show that has a good, solid populist high-concept premise, and muddied the sale because it's afraid of it. It's like FOX north.

Having seen the pilot of the show, I hope that viewers tune in and give it a chance. I'll have more on the show hopefully in time for Monday.

EDIT: I should say that what both Weinman and I bury here is that the on-air promo does a good job of explaining the premise. It's more like they're trying to split the difference with the print, so that you get a wider audience...kind of like how they sometimes cut different trailers for the male/female or white/black audiences. But considering the CBC's promo budget -- however big it is for CBC -- is a pebble in the bucket in TV terms -- that's a risky strateregy.