Lions and monkeys and cows. Oh my!

Wednesday, March 10, 2004

BY ALAN SEPINWALL

Star-Ledger Staff

Jaye Tyler thinks she’s going crazy because she keeps hearing instructions from the mouths of inanimate objects. I think I’m going crazy because I keep seeing TV shows about young women hearing instructions from people and things they shouldn’t.

To "Joan of Arcadia" (girl takes orders from God), "Tru Calling" (girl takes orders from corpses) and "Dead Like Me" (girl takes orders from Grim Reapers) we can now add "Wonderfalls" to this weird new subgenre.

This isn’t like all those "Friends" clones. Each of these shows was developed independently of each other long before any of them hit the air. Somehow, some way, four different sets of creative types got the idea that what the American viewing public was clamoring for was a show about disaffected, wisecracking ladies talking to the spiritual world.

Which isn’t to say it’s a bad idea, just an odd (and oddly coincidental) one. While "Tru Calling" is a waste of videotape, "Dead Like Me" has its charms and "Joan" is already one of the best dramas on television.

"Wonderfalls" has the misfortune of getting the last turn at bat, and it’s impossible not to make comparisons, especially since Fox scheduled it to run back to back with "Joan," which airs an hour earlier on CBS. Fox execs say they hope the "Joan" audience will change channels at 9, but while the shows have very similar concepts, the tones are markedly different, and it’s hard to see the audience for the openly sentimental "Joan" enjoying the detached, ironic world view of "Wonderfalls."

(Most likely, Fox suits recognize this and are dumping "Wonderfalls" on their least popular night because they have no faith in it. This way, when it fails, at least they have a ready-made alibi for the bad timeslot.)

Winning newcomer Caroline Dhavernas plays Jaye, an overeducated, under-motivated 24-year-old with an Ivy League philosophy degree and a minimum-wage job at a Niagara Falls souvenir shop. While her parents and siblings are all bubbly go-getters — mother Karen (Diana Scarwid), for instance, writes travel books with titles like "Thumbing Through the Finger Lakes" — Jaye prefers to have as little to do with the world at large as possible.

"Disappointing your family is an extreme sport for you," her best friend Mahandra (Tracie Thoms) tells her, while another friend notes that she’s "managed to create a stressless, expectation-free zone around yourself."

So how’s a nice alienated girl like this start interacting with people? The wax lion tells her to.

For reasons yet to be explained — and, judging by the whimsical, mysterious tone of the early episodes, probably never to be explained — inanimate objects with animal shapes start talking to her. A wax lion from a vending machine at the store. A brass monkey on the desk of her mother’s psychiatrist. The cow on her trailer park neighbor’s apron.

As on the other talking-to-(blank) shows, the commands Jaye gets are fairly cryptic, as are the results of her actions. In one episode, she’s told not to give a customer a refund; when Jaye doesn’t listen, the woman’s purse gets snatched while she’s putting the refund money away. In another, she’s sent to reunite a lonely Russian mail order bride with the fiancé she met over the Internet — who turns out to be a pushy 13-year-old boy.

When everything clicks, as in the mail order bride episode, "Wonderfalls" makes you accept Jaye’s bizarre situation and understand why the wax lion is bossing her around. But the show is so wacky, so in love with its own quirks that it occasionally seems as smug as its misanthropic heroine. (There’s an episode guest-starring Eddie Kaye Thomas from the "American Pie" movies as a not-so-fat neighbor nicknamed Fat Pat that’s almost painful in its self-satisfaction.)

In theory, Jaye will learn from the adventures the little tchotchkes send her on that people aren’t all bad and the world can be a nice place to live. Hopefully, the creators of "Wonderfalls" will learn they don’t have to try so hard to seem different — even in a primetime universe with so many other shows about women having impossible conversations.