TV Tidbits Interesting Wonderfalls falls victim to Fox’s usual lack of support

Friday, April 9, 2004

Winston-Salem Journal

Wonderfalls has joined the list of great TV shows that have been canceled because of poor scheduling and promotion by the Fox network.

The show’s executive producer, Tim Minear, announced the cancellation on his official Web site, ww.timminear .net, adding that he and the show’s other producers plan to see "if there’s some venue in which to air the remaining episodes."

Only four of the show’s 13 episodes aired.

Fox has a habit of ordering interesting, edgy programs and then failing to give them enough time or support to find an audience.

A few months ago, when I interviewed Mike Reiss - the creator of the animated sitcom The Critic - he said that Fox had "strangled the show in its crib." In a letter to fans of Wonderfalls, Minear used a similar analogy, saying of the Fox executives: "I don’t think they MEAN to strangle something in the crib. I know that the next time I shop something to a network, I’m going to hope to find a network that understands and believes in the thing they ordered. And if they thought it looked good on the menu, I’d hope they’d still have a taste for it once it got to the table."

Other victims of Fox indifference in recent years include Family Guy, Futurama, Andy Richter Controls the Universe, Greg the Bunny, Action, The Tick, Keen Eddie, The Lone Gunmen and another Minear-produced series, Firefly.

Many of these shows have gone on to highly successful home-video release. Strong DVD sales have led to a new season of Family Guy and a plan for a theatrical version of Firefly, both due in 2005. Perhaps the afterlife of those shows will prove the value of patience to Fox executives. Or perhaps they’ll learn, after such recent flops as Forever Eden and Playing It Straight, that lousy reality shows aren’t the wave of the future.

Old Salem’s newest exhibit, the 1800 Tannenberg organ, will be featured in a segment of the CBS Sunday Morning newsmagazine show, which will be shown at 9 a.m. Sunday. The segment, which was taped March 18-20, will also look at Old Salem and discuss the tradition of the Easter Moravian Sunrise Service.

One of The Sopranos gang made a visit to Winston-Salem in the most recent episode of HBO’s hit series.

In Sunday’s installment, Tony’s nephew Christopher, played by Michael Imperioli, was sent to Winston-Salem to pick up a load of stolen cigarettes. While he was gone, rumors began circulating that Tony was having a fling with Christopher’s fiancee, Adriana. Christopher returned seething with jealousy, complaining about being sent to deal with "a bunch of rednecks" while he was being cuckolded (his actual words were a bit cruder).

Series creator David Chase attended Wake Forest University in the late 1960s before transferring to New York University, so it’s no surprise that Winston-Salem would come up in the show eventually. What was surprising, however, was that Christopher had come all this way from New Jersey to pick up crates of Marlboros.

The episode, "Irregular Around the Margins," will be repeated at 9 p.m. today on digital cable channel HBO2 and at 1:15 a.m. Sunday on HBO.

The Sci Fi Channel unveiled its plans for next season and beyond on Monday. Perhaps the best news for science-fiction fans is that the network will show a four-hour Farscape mini-series in late 2004. Farscape: The Peacekeeper War will resolve the cliffhanger left behind when Sci Fi abruptly canceled Farscape in 2003. The miniseries has been in the works for a while but did not have a home until now.

Other Sci Fi Channel projects include a weekly series of Battlestar Galactica; miniseries adaptations of Larry Niven’s Ringworld series, Michael McDowell’s Blackwater novels and Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea novels; and TV movies from such cult favorites as Stan Lee (Marvel Comics) and Bruce Campbell (The Evil Dead).