One of my friends suggested that I check out the pilot for the 2009 TV series called Being Erica from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). She thought that it had a lot of ties to things that I had discussed.
Erica Strange (Erin Karpluk) is 32, has a master in English lit, and has recently been fired from her dead end job “for being too smart”. Her family all think of her as a total basketcase: “When are you going to get a real job?”
The brunch with the family scene is unfortunately only slightly overdone. Only the jobs were out of line.
Erica has nothing but regrets about her multitude of bad decisions over her life, and through a mechanism that can only occur on television because it will likely never be explained, she has opportunities to visit certain of these regretted moments and do things differently.
Doesn’t work out like she’d want, of course.
The show will probably deteriorate into stupidity, but the first half of the pilot is pretty accurate in what hidden high potentials — especially those whose natural domain of work is not Organizational (her brother-in-law) or Disciplinary (her sister) — suffer through. Everything interesting for these purposes is before 10:45.
You may be able to watch it below from it’s hulu.com location, or there may be “American only” restrictions. Canadians can stream it from CBC.ca’s online system. It was on E4 in the UK and ABC2 in Australia.
[Viewing advisory: In the states, Being Erica‘s pilot below would come with a “sex, drinking and drug taking” warning. If it had complete nudity it could be an HBO series from the early 1990s.]
Digital television camera. © 2012 Arild Vågen (-CC BY-SA 3.0). Via Wikimedia Commons.