You feel you have stepped into a world that was not only there before you arrived, but before the writers invented it. But everything clicks here.Įven though the particulars of “Wonderfalls” are not particularly new - there’s a best friend (Tracie Thoms), a kooky family, a funky boss - the particulars of the particulars seem fresh.
We are accustomed to these things from television, which because of its short production schedules and budgetary constraints and the need to sell soap is defined by compromise.
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TV is, almost by nature, a medium of constant disappointment: of good performance flattened by bad lighting, decent scripts killed by bad acting, high production values made to look shallow by ridiculous scripts.
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Through a series of events so arbitrary as to be irrelevant, Jaye is suddenly plugged into an unnamed omniscience that manifests itself through otherwise inanimate talking animals - a wax lion, a cow creamer, an appliqued buffalo, a mounted fish - that give her orders whose meaning is not always clear: “See a penny, pick it up.” “Don’t squeeze the Charmin.” “Give the lady a chair.” Action taken, one thing leads to another, but it’s a universe run on the order of Rube Goldberg, where first cause and final effect are often so far apart as to suggest no actual relationship between them.Ĭreated and written by Todd Holland (“Malcolm in the Middle,” “The Larry Sanders Show”) and Bryan Fuller (who created the above-mentioned “Dead Like Me”), and co-executive produced by Tim Miner (“Buffy,” “Angel”), “Wonderfalls” is so well done, so fresh and unpredictable, and so little in thrall to conventional virtues as to make the weary reviewer prostrate with joy.
There are no touching angels here, no talk of the lovely, gentle, caring universe that enfolds us all.
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It is also refreshingly free of, for want of a better word, religion. “I’d be homebound, too, if I could get away with it,” she tells a neighboring hermit she reintroduces to the world, to her quick regret. “Take that ‘thank you’ back,” she tells a man whose 20-year sobriety she inadvertently helps preserve. “I don’t help people,” Jaye insists, having accidentally caught a flying baby. “Wonderfalls” is not without moments of warmth and young love, but it distracts you from them as fast as it can. “It’s a lot like drowning that way,” Jaye says. “Life can be sort of peaceful when you stop struggling,” says Eric, the cute bartender (Tyron Leitso, of “Dinotopia”), who is shaping up, but not too quickly, as a love interest.
Indeed, the worst thing that could happen to the show would be for her to surrender to happiness. She is on good terms with her alienation and her distancing irony, and not ready to let them go. In helping others, you will not be surprised to learn, these women help themselves.Īnd while this is true also of “Wonderfalls,” what raises it above those other shows is that its main character, the spectacularly underachieving Jaye Tyler (Caroline Dhavernas), who has a degree in philosophy from Brown, works in a Niagara Falls souvenir store and lives in a trailer park, does not welcome the improvements. “Tru Calling,” “Dead Like Me” and most similarly “Joan of Arcadia” are its chronological foremothers, though not its inspiration, and I would include the yenta comedy “Miss Match” (lately missing itself, sadly) as a close cousin.
“Wonderfalls” comes late in a TV year that offered a plethora of angry young women called upon by supernatural forces to help strangers who do not always know they’re in trouble.
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