The Medium is Not Enough

In Canada: Mondays, 9pm, CBC

UPDATED 9/1/9: With new pic and vids
UPDATE 2: Apparently, the BBC is going to acquire this, although no airdate is fixed

There’s kind of a golden rule in time travel stories: never interfere with your own past. Don’t go meet your parents because your dad or mum will fall in love with you and you’ll never be born; don’t try to save a relative’s life because the wee timerous beasties will start eating you while you’re trapped in a church. That kind of thing.

The other golden rule is that you’re travelling in time to make a difference to the world. Let’s stop war being averted, aliens invading and taking over, or the future president of the United States from being killed by assassins.

Being Erica laughs – it is a dramedy after all – at that kind of jessie talk. It’s a time travel show in which the heroine does nothing but interfere with her own past, all because her life’s a bit of a mess and she’d quite like a decent job or boyfriend for a change.

Erica Strange is 32, lives in Toronto and her life has gone to pot. She has a Masters but works in a call centre – or should that be worked? She’s cute but always gets dumped or treated badly by rubbish men. Everyone she knows seems to be married and successful. If only she didn’t keep making such bad decisions.

After she wakes up in hospital after an allergic reaction to a nut-infused coffee, a mysterious, saturnine man called Dr Tom (Baker?) turns up at her door offering her therapy that’s guaranteed to fix her life. What he doesn’t tell her is that it involves travelling into her past to points in her life when she made bad decisions to see if she’d make a better job of things with the gifts of hindsight and maturity.

First ‘leap’: Prom Night.

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