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Little Accurate with Being Erica

By Amy Lavender Harris

20090201beingerica.jpg
Erin Karpluk as Erica Strange. Screencap from last week’s episode.


Why does CBC’s new show Being Erica, with all its snappy writing and solid acting, go out of its way to reduce Toronto to a robotic, corporate caricature of the sort that’s lampooned across the rest of Canada?
The show follows status-conscious, thirty-two-year-old Erica Strange (the L-Word‘s Erin Karpluk) as she travels back in time to “fix” mistakes she’s made in the past. This would normally constitute a fairly weighty ethical endeavour, but in Toronto’s competitive job market, time-travelling is a form of career counselling. Erica’s trips to the past seem to be in aid of getting a “real” job in the present, presumably in either investment banking or heart surgery, her siblings’ careers (her current job, which affords her a multi-bedroom apartment in the Annex, apparently doesn’t cut it).
So, Erica goes back in time to lose her virginity to the “right” guy—BAM!—she gets a job interview in the present. She goes back to placate an eccentric English professor—BAM!—she manages to keep the angry boss (Reagan Pasternak) at her cut-throat publishing company in check. Who needs redemption when you can get a desk job at at a publishing company run by a sociopath?
Even worse, the show seems to go on a cycle of locations shoots from Yorkville to U of T to Rosedale with little else in between. The sanitized Toronto here is all ivy league quads and office towers, tony restaurants and coffee chains. Erica supposedly lives on Palmerston Avenue, but don’t expect any picturesque shots of the Annex. For some reason, Cumberland Street is now Sugar Street (did they expect the millions of Torontonians familiar with Yorkville not to notice the change?). And while there are some cute touches in the 1990s flashback scenes (a recurring character holds a newspaper featuring the 1992 World Series–winning Blue Jays), you wish they’d gone more for the empty parking lot Toronto of the old Kids in the Hall intros.
The telling line comes in one scene, when Erica and an old flame enjoy a beer on a lovely summer day until one of Erica’s various lawyer/corporate banker/accountant friends shows up and says, “That’s so un-Toronto of you.” Yes, back to the grind, get that corner office with the great view of Sugar Street, and if you make any mistakes, just go back in time to fix them: when you get back, there’ll be a promotion waiting. That seems to be the Toronto the CBC wants you to know. It’s not a city anyone living here would recognize.

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  • http://null 32teeth

    OMG, i totally feel the same, this is just like in Heroes where i noticed Hiro picked up a yellow piece of paper, but when the angle change, he was holding a white piece of paper… …seriously, learn to TV! it is a fictional toronto.
    Now get back to your cubicle, and make sure no one is looking over your shoulder when you post a ‘naughty’ response

  • http://null duncan.bikingtoronto

    This ranting post sounds a little too BlogTO.
    The show, the story and everything about the concept is fiction. It’s a fictional Toronto with fictional characters and fictional locations. An early scene shows Erica dropping off a resume at what is supposed to be a publishing house but is really, I believe, the Four Seasons Centre.
    Perhaps, if Erica spent her time knee-biting in those empty parking lots you so long for, well, the show would completely suck. Maybe she should be pining over the job market at Sweaty Betty’s and lamenting the loss of authenticity on the Queen West strip.
    You know why the show’s writers and producers chose not to represent the hip Toronto of now… because whining blog writers do it so well online already.
    And since when is the Horseshoe a “tony restaurant”???

  • http://null valerieintoronto

    Yep, I pretty much agree. I’m not incredibly concerned about how my city is reflected in a CBC show about time travel. I do agree it’s a bit unfair, considering “the West” in real life is exactly the way it is on Heartland and Wild Roses.

  • http://null blackfax

    I can’t say I was expecting much from this show, or that I’ve watched it, but I’m really not too surprised that the Toronto the world sees on this show is the same fictional city that a lot of outsiders genuinely believe exists(juxtaposed with a crime-ridden Escape From New York-esque image from whatever CP24 shows, of course).
    Maybe Erica will have to take a time-travel back to ‘The Lower West-End’(Parkdale) to fight an old drug dealer for money, thusly securing her stronghold on a meth lab in her present adult life. I’d watch it.

  • http://www.bitpicture.com Marc Lostracco

    When I started watching the first episode, I began to roll my eyes at yet another generic thirtysomething with an existential crisis, but I was pleasantly surprised and had changed my mind by the end of it, and I’ve actually quite liked the subsequent episodes. The premise is good, the writing is solid, and I thought Toronto as a backdrop looked pretty good.
    I don’t agree with the “BAM!” plot statements. Part of what I’ve liked about the flashbacks is that the result isn’t entirely expected when she returns to the present. Not that it matters—general audiences like predictability and happy endings.
    The “platonic (or is he?)” manfriend character is a milquetoasty dud, however.

  • http://undefined spacejack

    I also think should represent Toronto more accurately – like the way Entourage or Californication accurately represent Los Angeles, without playing up common stereotypes.

  • http://undefined rek

    Maybe we should be glad it’s shot and set in Toronto.

  • http://null sbot

    I only saw one episode but considering she can go back in time, I think we can suspend reality when it comes to street names and locations, can’t we?

  • http://null McEVIL

    Yeah and the time-traveling seems a tad unbelievable too! SO not possible!

  • http://null andrew

    Two shows, shot and set in Toronto, this and Flashpoint. Both are pretty good for showing Toronto as it is.

  • http://null RealityCheck

    What useless leftist whining.
    A “multi-bedroom apartment” isn’t a good thing, it just means she isn’t on minimum wage or living like a student. If she owned a renovated Victorian on Palmerston, then she’d have some material success – or better yet on South Drive and not in the crime and hippy infested hell hole that is the Annex.
    Getting a real job is a good thing, rather than something horribly foreign, for anyone outside of the failed writers here at Torontoist.
    Also, the real Toronto IS Rosedale, Yorkville, the Annex, St. George Campus, and downtown. The rest of the city is crap, especially places like Cabbagetown and the Beach which are filled with CBC employees and other Marxists like Dick Whitall.
    Emeril called from 5 years ago and he wants you to stop using the word “BAM!” as he has a perpetual copyright on it in all uses – see his old ads for horrible tasting toothpaste.
    Torontoist needs to get rid of brain dead reflexive leftists who rely on a warmed-over 60′s ideology to filter the real from the sold-out. It would also help to have writers who have looked at the city’s skyline and know who works in those buildings – Investment Bankers, lawyers, accountants, consultants, publishing execs, ad firms. All those illegitimate and unrealistic jobs!

  • http://undefined andrew

    Has anybody ever found out why, exactly, Reality Check persists in doing what he or she is doing? Were they bitten by a troll, or maybe laughed at in primary school?

  • http://null mlr

    *applause*
    I enjoy Torontoist, and the writing here. I also appreciate the bracing, caustic reactionary voice provided by RC and others. I like to watch pwoggies squirm, and reply (see Andrew’s post below) by speaking power to truth.
    It’s so revealing.

  • http://www.amoresplendidlife.com Richard Whittall

    Hear hear! I especially liked the Emeril line.

  • http://null Svend

    I like RealityCheck’s take on things, why are differing views seen as trolling?

  • http://null andrew

    RC is a parody. Don’t know why, don’t know how, but that just isn’t real. I talk to people who are socially conservative, fiscally conservative, or both, and they aren’t that dumb.
    Anyways, the show’s on tonight. Let’s see what part of the “real” Toronto gets displayed.

  • http://undefined David Topping

    I kind of hate the show, but I can’t stop watching it (time travel! It’s kind of awesome!), and I can’t decide how I feel about the way it depicts Toronto. Though it is unashamedly filmed entirely in Toronto, throughout, it quite often disguises the specific circumstances of that in some way. As Richard mentioned, Cumberland Street is Sugar Street on the show, and on one of the first episodes, they had that beautiful glass-walled opera house at Queen and Avenue serving as a publishing house. I get that American films shot here have to pretend that they weren’t, but watching the show too often feels like watching some bizarro version of Toronto. I’m not entirely sure that it’s a “fictional Toronto” as TheSocialSparrow suggested.
    (Oh, and in the interests of full disclosure, I was involved in the shooting of the show’s second episode on U of T campus as a site coordinator. I am in the background of one of the shots for two seconds, maybe!)

  • David Topping

    Oh, and the show was just bumped to Wednesday nights rather than Mondays. Dunno if that’s a good thing or not.

  • http://null badbhoy

    Bill O’Reilly called from five years ago and he wants you to stop using your divisive, inflammatory language and your need to inject your politiical views in to every topic from a tv show to a restaurant review. He has a copyright on thick headed polemics.
    And before you try to bully me and accuse me of being a Marxist softie or something, I have no problem with what you say, just how you say it. You are a troll and give conservatives a bad name.

  • http://undefined chardy

    “In the Itchy and Scratchy CD-ROM, is there a way to escape the dungeon without using the Wizard’s Key?”

  • http://undefined rek

    It’s not his differing views that make him a troll, it’s his insistence on inserting his political rants into every comment he posts.

  • http://undefined Roxanne Bielskis

    I’m with Marc on this one (both defending the show and the milquetoast dud dude). And re: shooting in locations that are not actual publishing houses, etc., those places aren’t always available to be filmed in. Every show uses that kind of thing. We scour Hollywood films for every hint of Toronto in the background (and even post a regular feature about it). Why do we have to be such fanboys about a show that is actually set in toronto (LOL!!! @ Chardy, btw!)? Let’s cut them some slack.

  • http://www.amoresplendidlife.com Richard Whittall

    We’re so used to lack of dramatic representation in this city, what with constantly being disguised in various Hollywood flicks, that we see any show at all that attempts to show the “real” Toronto as a godsend. Again, it’s this inferiority complex. If we only get one show like this, I want it to be good.

  • http://undefined nimzowisch

    some fat-ass is known to have said the following about political economy that can apply equally to the almost maternal bond that exists between some people and the media they consume:
    ‘the peculiar nature of the material it deals with summons into the fray on the opposing side the most violent, sordid and malignant passions of the human breast …’

  • http://undefined Rachel Lissner

    Erica’s apartment is really 347 Palmerston. I am quite pleased with my discovery.