Being Erica

Most people will readily volunteer the list of shows they watch as long as they are sure that list at least marginally conforms to what all the cool people are watching (things like "Lost" and "Grey's Anatomy," two shows that I have never seen, but feel as though I have seen because of the way blurbs about their gripping plots invade commercials and other media). I will, however, admit that I have seen a few partial eposodes of a new show called "Being Erica"; it's a series that's way too smart to be on SoapNet* (where it currently airs) but maybe too dumb to be on Bravo.

The issue is this: Being Erica has a premise that doesn't know how deep it is, and maybe this lack of awareness is what makes the show such fun to watch. I shall summarize:

Erica is a 32 year old single woman who is vaguely unhappy with her life because of myriad regrets about this and that. She is, in fact, all of us. She meets a shady shrink who somehow possesses the power to take Erica back in time to revisit certain times in her life to "fix" things (and during these extended flashbacks we, the viewers, are assaulted with endless 80s and 90s pop culture references; the show can be revoltingly self-referential). But, as Erica finds, fixing things is more complicated than she had envisioned, and often the original circumstances are not as she had imagined. This particular scene shows Erica trying to rectify a disastrous poetry reading in a college creative writing class from the early 90s--only instead of reciting the original poem she had written, she, due to the inexplicable antics of her stereotypical histrionic nutcase professor, is forced to rip off a Britney Spears song:



Being Erica, in fact, has a plotline eerily similar to an entertaining book I read in my late teens called The Strange Life of Ivan Osokin, by Russian author P.D. Ouspensky. Ivan Osokin, too, had many regrets and was in a rut much like Erica. Desperately seeking a chance to go back and change things and make better decisions with the mature knowledge he had as an adult, he happens to run across someone who can grant that wish. Ivan, thus, gets whisked back in time (only much further back than Erica--his first trip to his past takes him back to age 12). But, alarmingly, Ivan ends up making the exact same decisions--even bad decisions that are clearly going to have bad consequences. The novel is actually very funny--in the first episode, Ivan, even with his illuminated adult knowledge of right and wrong, is unable to resist the urge to draw a moustache on the portrait of his school's head master--an act for which he is severely reprimanded...again. Upon returning back to his present time, Ivan pleads to go back again and re-relive this event, asserting that this time he will not indulge in such childishness. He is granted the chance to go back, and whaddya know, he once again, even with full knowledge of the potential consequences, draws the moustache and gets his comeuppance. The point of the book is this: when we regret one of our actions, we have a considerable amount of distance from the circumstances, and often the truth is that, given the chance, we probably would still do or say everything as we did it then, because all of the tiny contextual elements we cannot even recall now dictated that response.

People love to say that hindsight is 20/20, but the truth is that even hindsight is blurred by our assumptions about the who, what, when, where, why, and how of everything that has happened to us. That book completely changed the way I think about memories and wishing for second chances, and now I'm seeing it warmed over in an hour long Soapnet show.

The ad hype for Being Erica (being as it is on "Soapnet", a station that shamelessly panders to the terminally brainless) promotes it as lighthearted comedy/drama for 30-something women who pine for the carefree-ness of their teenage years rather than the foray into wrenching metaphysical questions that the show actually is. What the writers and producers may not understand is that, in tackling the issue of regrets and going back in time to "do things better," they are tapping into some heavy moral and psychological territory.

*I don't actually watch Soapnet--seriously--it just happens to be part of the cable package I have that also allows me to get useful, academic stations like Discovery and the National Geographic Channel--by the way, if you've never seen that series called "Locked up Abroad," it is pretty fascinating too.