New Soap’s Heroine? A Jewish 30-something

Erin Karpluk, the star of “Being Erica.”

Erin Karpluk, the star of “Being Erica.”

by Alice Burdick Schweiger

When “The Young and the Restless” revealed a couple of seasons ago that the hunky Brad Carlton (Don Diamont) was secretly Jewish and that his mother was tracking down stolen Nazi art, it broke some ethnic ground in the soap opera world.
Now, moving a step further down the diversity road, comes a soap about a Jewish 30-something woman who gets to revisit her disastrous bat mitzvah and a sinful Yom Kippur.

“Being Erica, ” a new one-hour prime time drama, premieres this week (Feb. 19 at 10 p.m.) on the Soapnet channel. The show takes place in Toronto and focuses on Erica Strange (Erin Karpluk), a single, attractive, funny, 32-year-old middle-class Jewish girl. She is not religious, yet has a strong Jewish identity. Going through a life crisis, Erica finds herself jobless, single and with no real plans for the future.
After having a date cancel on her, being fired from her job and suffering an allergic reaction that lands her in the hospital, Erica turns to Dr. Tom (Michael Riley), a mysterious, unconventional therapist who helps her examine her many regrets. His method has Erica embarking upon a journey to relive pivotal moments in her life where she believes she chose the wrong path. Some of these relived experiences include a high school dance, a job interview and the time she lost her virginity.

One of these do-over incidents involves her bat mitzvah (airing March 19). At the time, she stormed out of the party that her parents had planned for months. Going back, after reading again from the Torah, she can choose to stay at the party and avoid repercussions. In another episode (airing April 2) Erica seeks forgiveness for a past mistake on Yom Kippur.

“This is about women and men in their early 30s, who are single and trying to find themselves,” says the show’s creator, Toronto native Jana Sinyor, adding that the series has echoes of “Ally McBeal” and “Sex and the City.”

Sinyor, who is Jewish and 32, draws from some of her personal experiences. “Erica and I don’t have the same life — I am married and have two children — but the way she acts, her closeness with her friends and her closeness with her family and their issues, are very familiar to me. Erica is an amalgamation of a lot of different women I know — educated, bright and talented but they aren’t married by 30, have no children and don’t have the career they had hoped they would. They feel like there are failing relative to their peers.”

Sinyor, who graduated from McGill University with a degree in religious studies, felt it was important to make Erica Jewish. “There is a tendency to want to make a character universal and ethnically or culturally ambiguous, but I wanted Erica to be as specific as possible in every way. Because I am Jewish, it’s very natural for me to make her Jewish. She is someone who grew up with the traditions, but not necessarily religious or particularly observant, although her father is a rabbi.”

“It’s great to have more of a religious balance, especially on a soap,” says Stephanie Sloane, editor of Soap Opera Digest. “I think it’s wonderful that the character is Jewish.”

Westchester Jewish Conference

Westchester’s Jewish Community Relations Organization