I discovered a fun series on Amazon Prime this weekend (actually, a friend recommended it years ago when it was originally on, but it was a Canadian series, so I didn’t have a way to watch it, but I recently stumbled across it on Amazon and remembered the recommendation): Being Erica. It’s basically paranormal chick lit in TV series form, and it’s a comedy that really makes you think.

Erica is a 33-year-old woman whose life hasn’t gone at all like she hoped. She’s bright, pretty, and has a master’s degree, but she’s still single with a terrible dating life and she can only seem to get dead-end jobs — and then get fired from them when her bosses decide she’s so overqualified that she must be bored. After a truly terrible day, a therapist approaches her, gives her his card, and tells her he can help her fix her life. After another terrible day, she takes him up on the offer. She tells him that she knows her life isn’t working because she’s made bad decisions along the way. He tells her to make a list of these bad decisions. She just about fills a notebook. He asks about the first one on the list, something that happened in high school. Next thing she knows, she’s back in high school, but with all the knowledge and memories of what came later.

The premise of the show is that each week she’s sent back in time to revisit one of her past bad decisions. In the episodes I’ve seen so far, the chance to change things doesn’t really change things, and that’s actually rather reassuring. The sense isn’t that nothing you do matters, but rather that the things she looked at as terrible decisions weren’t necessarily bad for her. Sometimes it turns out she actually made the right call. Sometimes, the result was a blessing in disguise or something that might have happened no matter what she did. The change in the present is her gradually getting over the sense of being a loser and taking more control of her life now.

The result is both entertaining and empowering. I think we all probably have a list of regrets, things that we wish we could change. But if we dwell on where we went wrong, we can’t really move forward.

But the show itself isn’t that heavy. It’s not romantic (so far), but it has that romantic comedy feel, with the spunky kid/everywoman type underdog heroine having wacky adventures in time travel as she finds herself in high school or college but with her adult awareness. So much of the stuff streaming right now is so dark, so this was a fun find. People who like my Enchanted, Inc. books will probably like this series.