"Wonderfalls" the best TV show ever made

(The complete unaired original TV pilot. This is almost identical to the first episode that aired except for some cast changes.)

I have mentioned "Wonderfalls" on my blog a couple of times before. This weekend my wife was away at a NEA conference and I ended up having my own 'Wonderfalls' marathon, watching all 13 episodes and finishing up last night around 3am.

I haven't watched "Wonderfalls" in over three years, so I think this gave me some perspective. While I did remember the general story arc, it was a long enough time that much of it seemed fresh and new.

And, once again, I am amazed that this show was canceled. It would be as if 'I Love Lucy' was canceled after the first four episodes aired.

I watch a lot of television and I have to say that this show is, in my personal opinion, the greatest story ever told. If you haven't heard of the show before, or never got around to renting it on Netflix, I cannot recommend it enough.

Below is a short review I wrote on this blog four years ago after having seen the fourth episode and (to my absolute and utter shock the *last* episode ever aired).


The other show I watched was called “Wonderfalls”. I watched the first episode and laughed about half the time. Unfortunately the other half of the time I was groaning. However, I read a review in the paper that said “each episode gets better’, so I stuck it out. Thank God I did!!

This last episode was incredible. It was extremely funny, strange, quirky, and insightful. If you don’t already know, “Wonderfalls” is some kind of a Gen-Y slacker rip-off of “Joan of Arcadia”. Our young protagonist is plagued by a mental illness where small sculptures and plastic toys speak to her and tell her to do odd and inexplicable things. This always produces a Rube-Goldberg chain of events that unfolds as an unpredictable mystery in each episode. The biggest mystery is whether Jaye is actually insane or is being ‘touched by the Universe’.

In this episode Jaye has an exorcism performed as she tries to come to grips with her new reality. It has more biting religious commentary than any Simpsons episode and is shockingly refreshing. It has more in common with an Ethan and Joel Cohen movie than the typical network sitcom. Sadly, because the show is so good, it is surely doomed to be canceled by the time you read this blog.

Here is a review from Amazon.com
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Wonderfalls is probably the most hilarious show you've never seen. An hour-long "dramedy" about a young woman who hears the voices of inanimate objects--which instruct her to help out total strangers--the show aired on Fox in early 2004 to critical acclaim and dismal ratings. After airing four times in terrible time slots, the show was quickly canceled, but not before a hue and cry from a small but fervently devoted cadre of fans went up, begging for all 13 episodes to be released on DVD.

Thus, the highest-profile DVD release of a canceled show was born, and the nine unaired episodes of Wonderfalls are finally seeing the light of day.

You may be wondering: is it worth it to check out a show that was axed so quickly? The answer is an unqualified yes, as Wonderfalls is quirky without being precious, sardonic without being bitter, and smart without being a show-off about it.

Jaye (Caroline Dhavernas) is a graduate of Brown University who's opted not to put her education to work, and instead lives in a trailer and works at a tourist shop in Niagara Falls, to the consternation of her affluent, successful family. All seems to be going well for this self-proclaimed slacker, until one day a small toy lion speaks to her in enigmatic epigrams, commanding her to help people. Loath to deal in any compassionate way with the rest of humanity, Jaye warily obeys, if only to make the voices stop. Soon, though, she finds herself to be an unwilling humanitarian and accidental hero when more inanimate objects start talking to her, and more people turn out to need her help.

The premise may sound a bit too off-the-beaten-path, but Wonderfalls' meddling with the ethereal was grounded in a keen awareness of post-college life and the travails befalling young twentysomethings who had no idea where their life was going. And instead of being sanctimonious or inspiring, the show was instead a complex mix of the heartfelt and the angsty, and Dhavernas was one of the most cynically hopeful heroines to grace the small screen. The rest of the cast was also topnotch, including Kate Finneran as Jaye's high-strung sister, Diana Scarwid as her caustic mother, and Tyron Leitso as bartender Eric, whose tentative romance with Jaye was both affecting and hilarious. Think of Wonderfalls as less of a failure and more of a rare opportunity to see some of the most creative television in recent memory. --Mark Englehart

And another:

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The 2003-2004 television season was one in which critics and fans expressed their growing outrage at the decay of standards in commercial television. On the one hand, the WB decided to cancel the critically acclaimed ANGEL despite an unprecedented fan effort to save the show. A growing stream of increasingly offensive reality shows made many wonder if there was any future for scripted television, or whether we were doomed to see shows like the widely condemned THE SWAN. But for many, the low point of the entire season was the cancellation by FOX of the extraordinary new show WONDERFALLS after only four episodes, despite a host of great reviews, many of them proclaiming it the finest new show of the year. More than this, it was as if FOX were determined for the show to fail, first placing it on Friday evenings (the worst night of the week for attracting viewers) for three weeks, before putting it on Thursday night opposite a host of the most popular shows on TV, therefore dooming it to low ratings. With the great reviews, one would have imagined that FOX would have found the show a new time slot and built an advertising and promotional campaign around the critics' ravings.

Luckily, WONDERFALLS is being released with the four original episodes and nine more that were completed but not released. The great news for those who saw those first four shows is that the next nine are even better. Indeed, if you were angry at the cancellation of the show based solely on those four episodes, you will go ballistic when you see how good these others are. The writers were obviously in defense mode from the first. One of the executive producers, Tim Minear, had been victimized the previous year when he served as executive producer of FIREFLY, which FOX similarly killed prematurely. This time, they assumed that the thirteen episodes might be all they got. As a result, WONDERFALLS is essentially a single self-contained story in thirteen parts. It could easily have led to a second season with new story lines, but the one season they did produce tells a single tale, with no major loose ends at all by the end of the final one.

As most who have heard of the show know, WONDERFALLS is the story of Jaye, a slacker living in Niagara Falls, NY (though most of the footage at the Falls is from the Canadian side) and working in a menial job in a souvenir gift shop. Her life is mundane and unpromising, when suddenly one day inanimate animals start talking to her. A lot of people who hear this aspect of the show are turned off, but trust me, it really won't be an issue for long for anyone who gives the show a chance. We never do learn why the animals talk to Jaye (though in one spectacular episode a bronze monkey, in response to her question of why they are all singling her out, tells her, "Because you listen"). In one episode near the end of the season there are hints that Jaye might actually be a spirit seer, and if so it is highly satirical that in American consumer society that she would be addressed by artificial, utterly fake animals instead of the real animals that Native American seers acknowledged as spirit guides.

The animals don't really give Jaye much choice in the matter of whether she is going to heed their commands. She learns very quickly that if she doesn't do their bidding, they will drive her crazy by such stratagems as singing endlessly "One Hundred Bottles of Beer On the Wall." She also learns that if she refuses to do their bidding, things can go very bad very quickly, and that if she does things can go miraculously right. For instance, she is commanded to do a number of things through consecutive episodes that apparently destroy a potential relationship with Eric, the young bartender who came to Niagara on his honeymoon, only to have his wife (played by FIREFLY alum Jewel Staite, as unlovable in this role as she was adorable as Kaylee in that show) cheat on him their first night there. Eric seems perfect for the prickly Jaye, but the animals don't seem to want to cooperate. I won't give away the end of the series, but I think the final episodes end about as perfectly as one could hope. After thirteen episodes in which Jaye has functioned as a pawn of fate, seeing her finally a little happy and content is a wonderful moment.

The cast is absolutely first rate, and by the end of the series all make a great contribution. Caroline Dhavernas is really fine as Jaye. She is not supposed to be a good or lovable or nice person. She definitely isn't a saint. As she puts it in one episode, in which she inadvertently saves a baby from injury, "I'm not a baby saver!" She ends up being a good person despite her own best efforts to the contrary. Tyron Leitso is enormously likable as Eric, who seems to be way too nice of a guy to be involved with a brat like Jaye. But the chemistry between Jaye and Eric is great, especially as their relationship gets enormously complicated by life (and inanimate animals) later in the season. At first I was alarmed that Jaye's family was going to play such a prominent role in the series, but all the performers were so exceptional that it ended up being one of the show's greatest assets. William Sandler as her doctor father, Diane Scarwid as her author mother, and Kate Finneran as her lawyer sister (all three highly successful in their jobs) were great and serve to emphasize how unsuccessful in life Jaye has been.. And I really liked Lee Pace as her brother Aaron, a doctoral student in religion who is the first to catch on that Jaye has an unusual relationship with the powers that be via fake animals (something he first suspects when he catches her talking to a cow coffee creamer). And Tracie Thomas is quite cute as Mahandra, Jaye's best friend and the surreptitious lover of Aaron (a fact only revealed to the other characters only in the final episode).

This is one of my favorite series of all time, and while I profoundly regret that FOX didn't give it a chance, I am grateful that the producers managed to tell a brilliant and compelling story. And I loved the setting in Niagara Falls. It was one of those rare shows where very nearly everything was perfect, except that it appeared on a network run by the mentally challenged. See this! I promise one of the most enchanting experiences of your viewing life.