A few weeks ago, I was lucky enough to go to the set of Being Erica. I got to walk around the different sets, like River Rock Publishing and Dr. Tom's office. (I got to sit in Dr. Tom's chair!) And, in addition to talking to Erin Karpluk, I had the extreme pleasure of talking to Being Erica executive producers Jana Sinyor and Aaron Martin about the show, their Gemini nominations and the new direction they're going in for Season 2. You can read my Q&A with them below, and you can tune in to the Season 2 premiere (the best episode to date, in my opinion) tomorrow night at 9 p.m. ET on CBC.
Congratulations on your nine Gemini nominations.
Aaron Martin, Jana Sinyor: Thanks.
How did you react to the nominations?
Sinyor: Oh, it was great.
Martin: It was exciting, yeah.
Sinyor: You know, we worked really hard on the series last year. I don’t know what I was expecting; I don’t know if we were expecting anything. I’m just really pleased.
Martin: There are only so many ways of getting feedback that the show’s doing well – the audience going online and awards shows.
You’re taking a bit of a different direction for Being Erica’s second season.
Sinyor: Some of the secondary characters from Season 1 – like, Season 1 really focused on Erica, and Season 2 is still focused on her but we’re going to be revealing a little bit more about the lives and worlds of our secondary characters.
Martin: First season was really about Erica jumping into therapy and it was really about her. We maintain that, but another direction we’re taking is Erica trying to help other people. So it becomes about altruism as well as her own journey forward. They meld together.
What made you decide to go in that direction?
Sinyor: It just feels like a natural progression. Initially, we focus inwards, on ourselves, and as you develop, you start to turn that focus outward and focus your attention toward others. You look at actual personal develop, there’s an initial focus on the self and as we become more confident with who we are and move forward, our scope widens.
Martin: And it plays into the bigger conceit of the series, which we’ll be hinting at throughout the season, of why there are these doctors, why they come into our lives.
Was it difficult to come up with that mythology?
Martin: Not really. [Jana and I] both come from a love of shows like that. The reason we both know each other and bonded is because of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which is a huge show with a big blueprint to it. It’s the kind of TV that we really like.
Sinyor: We like shows that have a fantasy element that are grounded in reality. That’s what this show is. We both loved that Buffy was very much set in the real world, that it had this whole underground thing with vampires. And The Matrix is a reference we often use; this feeling that this could be happening right now. We don’t want to break the illusion that it could be happening. It could be real. It’s really walking that fine line between fantasy and reality that we try to maintain.
The first season of a show usually has a learning curve, where the writers and the rest of the crew are still learning exactly what they want to do with the series. Are there elements of the first season that you think you could have done differently?
Martin: It was really hard writing the scripts off the top. It was hard finding the tone and the balance between comedy and drama. I think we’ve all been surprised at how much more this has become a comedy and a drama.
Sinyor: No, a drama than a comedy.
Martin: Really? I don’t know.
Sinyor: The thing about the show is that it veers wildly in tone all over the place. Most shows, they have a thing that they do and they do it every week. We have some episodes that are much lighter, significantly lighter, and then we have some episodes… Like, Episode 4, “The Secret of Now,” was a very comedic episode, where Erica goes back and sees her professor and recites “Baby One More Time.” And then the finale, where her brother dies, was a very dramatic episode. There’s just a huge scope when it comes to tone. Even balancing that so that it doesn’t feel like we have too many of one kind in a row, that’s hard.
Martin: I think that last year, the start struggled with how real to make the show. We knew that it had to be real but it was about making sure everybody else – the writers, actors, directors – making sure they know that. It took us a while to figure out, in our scripts, where to land on that line. But we figured it out in the first season, so in some ways, it was easier to write the episodes this year than last year. Not that it’s easy to write this show, because it’s not.
How long does it take from just breaking the episode to having a finished script?
Sinyor: It takes as much time as we have. It’s not even about that; it’s just ridiculously hard. I can’t emphasize enough how challenging it is. Aaron has an enormous amount of experience writing on other shows. My experience is more limited, but I think we both feel like the show is ridiculously difficult to write.
Martin: It’s got so many things fighting for your attention. It’s got two plots going at the same time, one that has to dovetail and the other that has to…
Sinyor: It has to relate to the theme and overall lesson of the episode that Erica learns.
Martin: And it has to relate to time travel, but the time travel can’t overtake the show.
Sinyor: And it can affect the future, but that’s not what the show’s really about. We’re not about trying to affect the future.
Martin: So yeah, it’s complicated.
With Season 1, it was clear that it was going to end with Erica dealing with her brother’s death. Is there a similar trajectory for Season 2?
Sinyor: There’s a whole new thread this year that I guess nobody knows about, except for people working on the show.
Martin: And we can’t talk about it.
Sinyor: We can’t get into it.
Martin: There’s going to be a new, for lack of a better word, mystery this year. And we’re setting that up in Episode 1.
There was a bit of criticism in Season 1 that Erica was a little judgmental.
Sinyor: Ooh, can you give me an example?
Well, this one I completely support and wouldn’t have the guts to do myself, but the wedding episode where she tells her sister not to marry her fiancé. But at other times, it seemed like Erica thought she knew how her friends should live their lives better than they did.
Sinyor: Well, the wedding is an interesting one because she actually gets proof. Erica goes back in time and finds out for a fact that her sister’s fiancé doesn’t really love her. The rest of us, we don’t have the luxury of that kind of thing, when someone we love is marrying the wrong person, we don’t know for a fact that it’s wrong. Initially, in the beginning of that episode, isn’t planning on saying anything. She goes back and basically gets a confession from Josh that he doesn’t love Sam, which he then kind of verifies in the present. Then she goes and says something to her sister. It’s a bit of a weird situation. That was an episode we grappled with a lot; there was a lot of strong feelings among the writers, that it was very controversial, what she was doing.
Martin: Did she have a right to say it or not.
Sinyor: Yeah. Our feeling has always been that Erica made a very courageous choice. That episode resonates very strongly with a lot of people because everyone has found themselves in a similar situation where someone they care about it is in a relationship with somebody that they don’t feel is right for them. And 90 per cent of the time, we say nothing, even though we desperately want to say something. This is an example of saying something, which I happen to think is brave. And this comes up all the time when we’re writing the show: we take a position. You know? And that position is played out on the show. There are other positions that could be taken but we take one, and the position we took in Episode 6 was that Erica was brave. It’s better to tell.
Martin: But I think you’re right, and we touch on this in Season 2, where a couple of people call Erica on being judgmental. There’s a scene in Episode 5 where somebody really lays into her. We were aware of it, to a certain degree, but I think that had to do with the fact that Season 1 was so much about Erica, how she was going to be reacting to everything around her and judging. Maybe she’s a little bit less like that this year.
Sinyor: I also personally feel like… I mean, the whole thing about asking people not to be judgmental, I think it’s a bit of crap. I think we’re all extremely judgmental. I think that’s how we live. I think you can’t really make choices or live your life without making a million little judgments every day. So the statement, “I’m not judgmental,” is often a cop-out. It’s usually a way of not dealing with something.
Martin: You’re still judging, you’re just not saying it.
Sinyor: We all take positions. When someone stands up and takes a position publicly, other people say, “Who do you think you are to judge?” But it’s kinda like, well, the only difference is we said it out loud.
Martin: We do talk about it this season. There are episodes that tangentially touch that, too.
Since you do take positions with the show, do you have a lot of fans or critics arguing with you over the specific opinions you express?
Martin: All the time.
Sinyor: All the time.
Martin: Especially when we pitch the weirder episodes.
Sinyor: Sometimes – I’m thinking of one particular episode we’re doing this season, which is extremely controversial. There were a lot of arguments. Pitching it was extremely challenging for me because sometimes, when you pitch something that makes people very uncomfortable, the pitching progress itself is very uncomfortable. You have to talk about things that people don’t talk about and it’s awkward. It’s awkward and it makes you blush and it makes you embarrassed and that can be very difficult. But we’re committed to doing stuff that we feel is universal and real.
Martin: There’s a TV way of doing things, and we try to make sure we don’t do the TV way of doing things. Like, last year, the Cassidy episode where Erica lived beside her and had an affair with her. Everyone was saying, “Erica’s going to be a lesbian if she kisses her!” And we’re like, “She’s not going to be a lesbian if she kisses her; she’s just going to be kissing her.”
Sinyor: I don’t know what huge percentage of women out there have kissed other women or had sexual relations with other women, who ultimately ended up in straight relationships. It’s such a pervasive, common thing. But there’s a fearful view that happens in TV, before the episode actually gets made, where people take a black-and-white approach. “If Erica kisses a girl, the audience will think she’s a lesbian.” And we like the nuance. The nuance can be a bit messy.
Martin: The other way to do it would have been to sensationalize it. “Ooh, there’s sex – make it titillating!” We chose not to. It’s not about the actions, it’s about why Erica’s doing it.
How do you convince people that you’re right in a situation like that?
Sinyor: We have very brave people at the CBC and at Temple Street productions. Temple Street and CBC, there are some key people in both places who are very brave. I was actually just speaking about this yesterday. A lot of time, stuff seems bland on TV because people at the top levels have said no to new and strange ideas. When you pitch an idea that’s strange and weird, it makes everyone uncomfortable and makes everyone worried. And the easiest thing in the world is to say no to that idea. And 90 per cent of the time, that’s what happens. The idea gets shut down, it gets made more bland…
Martin: It gets watered down.
Sinyor: Yeah, the freshness and excitement gets drained out of it. We’re in a unique situation where – ugh, I wish I could tell you about this episode because it’s the craziest episode that we pitched this year – but they said yes! They said yes to everything. The pitching process was excruciating, and the idea is outrageous, and they said yes because that’s what they do. We’re very fortunate with our partners.
Martin: We’ve also both been on shows where we didn’t have this lucky arrangement. You learn by doing, as well. We’ve both been burned by the watering-down process. It’s also really good that we have such a concise and clear set of people giving notes. There’s not 1,000 people involved, which makes it better.
Sinyor: And the people who are involved all feel the same way about the show and understand the show in the same way, which is invaluable and rare. Very rare.
You have your overall season arcs planned out, but how flexible are you to certain plot elements as production goes on?
Sinyor: Well, Meeri (Grace Lynn Kung) and Thomas Friedkin (Jeff Seymour) are examples of characters who came in as day players late in the season.
Martin: Well, as guest stars.
Sinyor: Guest stars, yeah. They came in as a one-off. There was no intention to make them recurring. And in this season, they’ve both been given quite large roles because we responded to how well they did. So that happens, sometimes.
Martin: I also think some plots rise out of episodes. In an early episode, we’ll realize that something opens up a whole set of other stories that we need to tell. Erica’s plot, we generally know from the start and follow it through. We’ve known where Season 2 is going since we pitched to the CBC.
Sinyor: Yeah, since back in February.
Is there a specific element to Season 2 that you really want to tell properly, and you’ll be inconsolable if it doesn’t come off like you wanted?
Sinyor: No. But then, we’ve seen half the season already. We’re on Episode 6, and we’re very pleased with the season that’s been made. We feel that it’s a step up from last season. I don’t think it’s like that – I don’t think a whole arc can fail unless you’ve made a terrible casting mistake or something. There are little moments in episodes that can fail, that can not be what you hoped. It’s a whole alchemy thing, you know? It has to be written properly, acted properly, directed properly. But for a whole arc to fail? No.
Martin: Well, the proof will be in when people watch it, though.
Sinyor: That’s true. It’s just our opinion at this point, right? Nobody’s seen it yet.
Were you upset last season when Being Erica was moved to Wednesdays, opposite Lost and American Idol?
Sinyor: It wasn’t on purpose.
Martin: We weren’t upset at first. Well, we were upset, but…
Sinyor: They meant well. Fox ended up moving American Idol.
Martin: Yeah, it was American Idol more than Lost that killed us. The reason behind it was really sound: CBC wanted us to have a better lead-in than we had. We were doubling the ratings of our lead-in, which is not a good situation to be in, and then we went after a show that had a great lead-in, but unfortunately, American Idol started a week later.
Martin: They moved it after we’d been changed, so we couldn’t change back. CBC has been unfailingly supporting of Erica. Really, we have no complaints at all. When they moved it, they moved it to give it a better time slot. And they’ve given us an amazing time slot this year.
Martin: And last year, by the end of the season, we actually got back about 90 per cent of our numbers, and we also kept a really high DVR and online viewership.
Sinyor: We’ve been doing amazingly in the reruns, also.
Martin: It’s worked out. You always want better numbers, but, you know.
Season 2 of Being Erica premieres Tuesday, Sept. 22 at 9 p.m. on CBC.