Thu, March 18, 2004

NBC's brutally unfair cancellation of Ed left a hole in my heart that will probably never be filled again. (And don't suggest porn, because I tried that.) It also left an hour-sized hole in my weekly TV lineup (44 minutes and change with TiVo), and while it's neither necessary nor difficult to fill the latter void, I'm not going to complain if an unexpected program comes along and does so with flair and grace.

Such a show, in case I was starting to sound too hypothetical, is Wonderfalls. It's new on Fox as of last Friday at 9:00, and before I go any further, I should mention that the pilot is re-airing tonight at 9:00 and you're highly encouraged to check it out. If you like it, you're caught up and ready for tomorrow's episode; if not, you can have a few easy laughs and then cheerfully go on with your life – and add yourself to the list of people who are never speaking to me again as a result of faulty recommendations.

The basic idea of Wonderfalls is that this young woman who's just graduated from Brown and moved back to her hometown to live in a trailer and work at the Niagara Falls gift shop is having a difficult time figuring out who she is and where she's going, and around about this time inanimate objects begin speaking to her and giving her directions. I'll admit that the premise of the show sounded a little iffy to me at first. But I gave it a chance for a few reasons. One is that the premise of Joan of Arcadia sounded similarly iffy (as well as just... similar) back before it started, and now it's one of the shows I most look forward to each week. Another (and this is the reason I gave it 3.5 stars sight unseen) is that the early "buzz" was pretty good for the show even though I hadn't ever heard about it. Usually that means something (either the show is good, or the network has paid for some pretty sweet junkets for entertainment writers). And another reason is that, while I have no intent to cover all of the mid-season shows the way I did with the new shows last fall (sorry, The Stones), I thought it would be nice to take a look at the ones that sounded most promising and share with you the benefit of my experience.

And it's a good thing, too, because if I'd allowed myself to think, gosh, this sounds a lot like Joan, that's kind of cheap, I would have missed out on something pretty fun. Wonderfalls takes an entirely different approach than Joan of Arcadia and not just in the religious sense. (So far, the items talking to Jaye give her cryptic commands that set in motion a chain of events which ultimately leads to good, but they haven't expressed any connection to the almighty.) Joan is a drama, even though it succeeds at not taking itself too seriously, while Wonderfalls is a very quirky comedy with a little drama mixed in. And I think that's why it reminds me of Ed just a little bit.

The show has a sarcastically blah tone that manages to be cynical without becoming depressing. The ultimate responsibility for maintaining this rests on the shoulders of Caroline Dhavernas, who plays Jaye to subtle perfection. Dhavernas is apparently a former child star in Canada, but this is pretty much the first that American audiences are seeing of her. She walks the delicate line between boredom and snippiness superbly. Her quick, often asynchronous, delivery assists the show's quick pace, which is similar to that of Malcolm in the Middle (another show produced by co-creator Todd Holland). It also reminds me of The Big Wide World of Carl Laemke, a brilliant series conceived by Mr. Show's Bob Odenkirk which never made it to air. Dhavernas is excellent as Jaye – a little off-kilter, but entirely capable; not too pretty, not too plain. She reminds me of a slightly more attractive Liv Tyler.

The show's writing is clever in a style similar to Malcolm in the way it calls attention to itself by being just a little unreal. However, Wonderfalls doesn't push this quite as far as Malcolm does – so far, at least, there's no instance of direct address from Dhavernas to the camera. The entire tone of the show is as familiar-yet-unusual as the Niagara Falls setting. There's a moment in the pilot when Jaye refers to "Native Americans" and her friend interrupts her- "Indians." Jaye corrects herself, "Indians," as though she's making a point of choosing the less politically correct term. This is never explained, so I think it's just supposed to be something funny that the friends do. I found it cute. The show hasn't yet defined clearly whether Jaye is crazy or whether these objects really are talking to her (I doubt it ever will), but the pilot tackled (as such pilots must) the question of why Jaye goes along with what they say. In the case of Wonderfalls, it's because the items will continue to torment her until they get their way. (Maybe this seems lifted from Ghost to you, but it works so you hush.) What impressed me is that the song that the little wax lion in the pilot sings in order to crush Jaye's resistance is "Ragtime Gal," the same one sung by Michigan J. Frog in the old Warner Brothers cartoons. (Incidentally, that same frog is now the mascot for the WB network – maybe he can introduce me to Lana!) I found this choice cute and apt, because it draws a parallel between the Michigan J. Frog cartoons and Jaye's situation. She can hear the talking objects, but others cannot; however, it's not because they couldn't, the objects just choose to shut up. Just the way Michigan J. Frog did – even, in this instance, right in the middle of his song. This is the one step that Joan's writers haven't taken: defining exactly how her encounters work. Are the people that talk to her real people who are briefly possessed, or just fleeting manifestations? We know others see them, but do they hear or understand Joan's conversations with them? In Wonderfalls, the frog reference goes a long way towards clearing this up right at the start.

I'm always impressed when a pilot feels as watchable as a normal episode of television. It's a heavy challenge, trying to fit in all the exposition and setup that is needed to introduce a new show and all its characters, and Wonderfalls manages to weave this into the first episode in such a way that it doesn't feel distracting or slow down Jaye's first adventure with the talking things. Her work situation, social life, and family dynamics are all introduced in brief as she goes about trying to deal with the new voices she's hearing. Her parents, incidentally, are played by the excellent character actors Diana Scarwid and William Sadler (he most recently seen in The Battle of Shaker Heights, HBO's second Project Greenlight movie).

Also on track are the look of the show and the decisions that have gone into the production values. It's a frustrating but unavoidable reality that TV producers have come to think of "transitions," the graphical/musical elements that segue between scenes or into commercial breaks, as a tool in the arsenal of defining a show's "look." That said, if you have to have them, the ones in Wonderfalls are pretty good. (For examples of transitions, think of the title cards and familiar music cue from Law & Order or the swish-pans and door-slam sound effects of Malcolm.) Some hour-long shows don't have transitions at all, like The West Wing, but these days, most do. Since Wonderfalls centers in part around tourism (Wonderfalls is the name of the gift shop where Jaye works), and the show's "surrender to destiny" theme is introduced by way of the tour guide patter that plays in an endless loop on the Maid of the Mist video in the store, the producers chose in this case to go with transitions that look like the slides of a ViewMaster toy being changed. It's fairly unobtrusive, as transitions go these days, and it's clever and quick and fits with the show's pace, style, and content. (I'm not suggesting that any of us makes a choice about watching a TV show based on the transitions – although they were a fine reason to skip Threat Matrix – but it's something about Wonderfalls that impressed me, so it deserves mention.)

Also notably well planned is the approach to the computer animation on the show. In future episodes, it appears that at least a few objects will be animated by traditional animatronic means, but for the most part, they are computer graphics. (In the pilot, it's a wax lion created by one of those tourist vending machines where you push in your money and watch the toy being molded through a Plexiglas bubble; he's joined at times by a bookend with a sculpture of a bespectacled monkey reading a book.) Wonderfalls takes the unusually intelligent approach of not foregrounding the special effects in this situation. Rather than reveling in the computer graphics, the show pushes them into the background, by treating them just like any other part of the scene. They're not afraid to have the computer-generated characters underlit, out of focus, or small in the corner of the scene. This enhances the realism and also makes the effects feel like part of the story, rather than a spectacle that we interrupt the flow of the narrative in order to gaze at in awe. This egalitarian view of visual effects is common to the films of Robert Zemeckis, where the effects are just tools to tell the story, rather than films like The Matrix: Revolutions or The Lord of the Rings or Star Wars: Episode I and II where the story serves as a reason for the effects. I'm a huge fan of the Zemeckis/Wonderfalls approach.

Ordinarily, I'd be more skeptical of a show on Fox, but I think they might have hired someone in their programming division who finally has an idea of what's good, considering the fact that they're not only airing Arrested Development, but they went so far as to order a full season. (And Family Guy might be coming back, too!) Plus, for what it's worth, "Entertainment Weekly"'s Ken Tucker has seen the next three episodes, and he says the show keeps getting better and better. So far, it's working for me; I could use some clever offbeat comedy in the absence of Ed.

POLL:

Wonderfalls

Wonderfalls

	I watched it last week and it didn't appeal to me.
	I watched it last week and I might watch it again.
	I watched it last week and I loved it!
	I'm planning to check it out after reading this review.
	Stop bothering me.

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