By Oliver B. Pollak
LOS ANGELES — Amazon Prime has started running a Canadian comedy drama series set in Toronto. Erica Strange, a thirty-two-year-old single, plucky and career frustrated, is played by Erin Karpluk and her middle age time traveling therapist, Dr. Tom, by Michael Riley. It is a bewitching and beguiling mix up.
At its heart is the concept of tikun olam, repairing the world or at least personal relations. In Ray Bradbury’s science fiction 1952 short story “The Sound of Thunder” they set the calendar ahead, about a hundred years to 2055. By missteps they disturb the universe and return to the early 1950s, with Hitler having won the war. Things can go awry in the round trip.
Erica’s regrets are about words spoken best left unsaid. About words unsaid best spoken. What can be undone or righted. Bat Mitzvahs, weddings, sermons and Purim are some of the Jewish do-overs. Her pot-smoking father, later in life, becomes a rabbi and leaves his wife. It’s high school reunions where all your classmates are 17 and you are 32 and you are older than your teachers. Boy, girl, girlfriend, and office politics stories proliferate. At least two episodes have sexual harassment issues, which if written today, seven years later, may have ended differently.
There is something about Canadian, Australian and New Zealand programs that buzz with incredulity, good writing, escapism, and generally 70 per cent per happy endings. The 49 CBC Television “Being Erica” episodes appeared between 2009 and 2011, sort of time travel in itself. It took some time to come to our attention, a NAFTA slipup. Karen and I have binged on as many as five episodes in a row. Then we realize how ridiculous we are, voyeuring on other people’s fantasy lives, and go to bed at midnight.
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Pollak, an attorney and professor emeritus of history at the University of Nebraska Omaha, is a SDJW correspondent now based in Richmond, California. He may be contacted via oliver.pollak@sdjewishworld.com