Falling for Wonderfalls

Fox’s Wonderfalls is the funniest show on television and the best new series of the season. So why aren’t you watching it?

by Jonathan V. Last

03/26/2004 12:00:00 AM

HURRY. Get your Wonderfalls quick. Before it’s too late.

This season has seen the premier of two high-quality, hour-long TV series. The first, Karen Sisco, was an adaptation of Steven Soderbergh’s 1998 film Out of Sight. Like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Karen Sisco proved to be a large and unexpected improvement on the original (although, unlike Buffy, the source material was darn good to start with). ABC aired nearly a half dozen episodes of the smart, sweet, and funny Sisco before pulling the plug.

The third episode of Wonderfalls airs tonight on Fox (9:00 p.m. est), and if the early returns are indication, we’ll be lucky if the executives at Fox allow three more of them to see daylight.

WONDERFALLS centers around Jaye Tyler (played by Canadian actress Caroline Dhavernas), a 24-year-old graduate of Brown (with a degree in philosophy), who lives in a trailer park in Niagara Falls and works at a local souvenir shop. Jaye is sullen, standoffish, clever, and incredibly spiteful—not to mention a junior varsity alcoholic—and she seems to be living her life as a direct rebuke to her successful, wealthy, and pleasantly offensive family (Karen, Darrin, Sharon, and Aaron Tyler).

That is, until she has a small neurotic breakdown. When Jaye comes to, small, inanimate objects—a toy lion, a brass sculpture of a monkey—begin talking to her. They urge her to do things and, unsurprisingly, no one else can hear them.

Jaye’s new talking friends give her instructions—do this, go there, talk to this or that person—and Jaye, already on the verge of crazy, listens to them. She becomes a deus ex machina, by way of Rube Goldberg. Much hilarity ensues.

LIKE ALL GREAT TELEVISION, Wonderfalls doesn’t look like much on the page. (Who’d want to see a program about four people who do nothing, or a girl who kills vampires, or a mobile Army hospital in Korea?) But in execution, it’s something else. Shot with David Fincher-style ingenuity, the show always feels as though it is about to careen off the rails, but if Wonderfalls is a roller-coaster, it’s Space Mountain—everything is so unexpected that we never see the turn or drop-off until we’re halfway through it.

The cast does outstanding work—particularly Dhavernas, whose performance is cool, self-assured, and tartly funny (see if you can spot the line readings where she merges Sarah Michelle Gellar and Alyson Hannigan). Even the theme song is memorable, thanks to XTC’s Andy Partridge.

The real star, however, is executive producer Tim Minear and his crew of talented writers. Each episode is packed with home-run jokes, most of which are mercifully unreliant on pop-cultural references. For instance:

Therapist: Tell me about your family.

Jaye: I don’t really want to gossip.

Obvious comparisons will be made to other faith-centric shows, particularly Joan of Arcadia, Mysterious Ways, and Touched By an Angel (Wonderfalls was at one point tentatively titled "Touched By a Crazy Person"), but none of these are apt—Wonderfalls substitutes black humor for earnestness:

Boy with a crush: Why struggle with faith? Life can be sort of peaceful when you stop struggling.

Jaye: It’s a lot like drowning that way.

Forget Joan of Arcadia; if anything, Wonderfalls is the lovechild of Amélie and Northern Exposure.

ALAS, the big wheels at Fox don’t seem to be 100 percent behind Wonderfalls. Sticking the mid-season replacement in the 9:00 Friday night casket was an inauspicious start. Advertising support has been lackluster. Then, last week, Minear was reduced to writing a letter to a popular entertainment website asking people to please tune in. Not a good sign.

In a perfect world, Fox would take a chance on Wonderfalls—move it to Sunday night, pair it with Arrested Development, air its reruns on FX, and stay with the show for a season or two. But in the end, Wonderfalls will probably be forced to surrender to destiny.

That doesn’t mean you should miss out. Tune in tonight and see what great television looks like.

Jonathan V. Last is online editor of The Weekly Standard.