ox departs from its slate of reality programming at midseason to premiere Wonderfalls, an offbeat fantasy comedy about an underachieving twentysomething woman who discovers to her horror that inanimate objects speak to her. Created by Bryan Fuller (Star Trek: Voyager) and Todd Holland (Malcolm in the Middle), Wonderfalls stars veteran Canadian child actress Caroline Dhavernas as Jaye Tyler, who works in a souvenir shop in Niagara Falls. When a wax lion begins speaking to her, Jaye fears she's losing her mind. But the cryptic messages set in motion a chain of events that force Jaye to interact with other people, whether she likes it or not.
Similar in theme to Joan of Arcadia and Fuller's own Dead Like Me, Wonderfalls nevertheless has a quirky charm all its own. In addition to Dhavernas (pronounced da-VERNA), the hourlong Wonderfalls features Diana Scarwid as Jaye's high-maintenance mother, William Sadler (Roswell) as her outspoken father and Lee Pace as her brother.
Wonderfalls is executive produced by Fuller, Holland and Tim Minear, formerly a writer and producer on The WB's Angel and Fox's Firefly. Dhavernas, Fuller and Minear took a moment recently to speak with Science Fiction Weekly about Wonderfalls, which premieres March 12 and will air Fridays at 9 p.m. ET/PT.
Caroline Dhavernas, tell us about your character.
Dhavernas: She works in a gift shop in Niagara Falls. She has a philosophy degree from Brown. She's not really using it. She's not going anywhere with that. And at some point in the store, inanimate objects start talking to her, and she thinks she's going crazy. She tries to ignore it at first. But at some point, she has no choice but to deal with it.
And she ends up, without wanting to, helping people around her. Like her family members or people she doesn't really know. So it's very interesting that way, because she's the worst person ... the universe could have chosen, because she doesn't want to help. It's a great show. It's quirky. It's fun. It also can be very sad and sensitive. So it's a great balance to watch.
How far along are you with the production?
Dhavernas: We have one episode left to do out of 13. So we've been working like crazy. Nonstop since July. And it's ... it's difficult not to know what's going to happen for so long. Most shows go for a month or two, then they're on the air for a while, so they know right away. But we've done the whole thing without knowing what the audience is going to feel.
Has the show changed much since the pilot, which was shot a while back?
Dhavernas: A few changes in the pilot. ... One actress is different, and also a few scenes were added. Other than that, the episodes are in the same line. ... [It's] the same kind of show. They're just very different in themselves. Each one is almost like a little movie, and they're all very fun.
It feels kind of like Showtime's Dead Like Me, Bryan Fuller's last series.
Dhavernas: I've never seen it. I try to see it, but it's never on when I'm home. ... But I heard about it, and yes, there's a similarity. ... I think it's such a fun thing to play, because you see a lot of teenagers who are girls be all fun and happy, and it's so fun to play a character who's so laid back and doesn't want to have to deal with people around her and has different layers to her as well, you know? Sometimes she'll think she's completely crazy, and she'll go from being annoyed to being helpful. ... So it's fun to play all that.
Do you worry about comparisons with CBS' Joan of Arcadia?
Dhavernas: Of course. Everyone compares us to that show. And I think they're doing a great job, that it's a good show. I saw only one episode. But I still think we're very different. Much funnier and quirkier than their show is, much more dynamic. And she's talking to God. We don't know who I'm talking to, and they're inanimate objects. They're not people. So it's much more absurd than Joan of Arcadia.
Bryan Fuller, this show felt like a sister show to Dead Like Me. Would that be inaccurate?
Fuller: I don't think that's inaccurate. I think they both were kind of coming out of the same period in my life. So the fact that there was that year that had Carrie and Dead Like Me and Wonderfalls, it was like three female protagonists who were all being woken up to the world in new ways by external forces that may or may not be supernatural. Yeah. Guilty.
What is it about your own life that informs these characters?
Fuller: I think everybody starts out one way or another at odds with the universe. And it's only a matter of time and experience where you figure out how to set yourself up and stop struggling.
Where does the quirkiness of the show come from? Are you just a weird guy?
Fuller: I would say it's very accurate that I'm a weird guy. That's definitely true. And it's also, I think it's just more fun to write, as opposed to staying true to traditional drama. It's a blast to kind of take license and have a little fun.
What is it taking so long to get on the air? (The show was originally slated for the fall of 2003.)
Fuller: Evidently there was a mixed reaction at the network. Like, some people loved the show, and some people didn't get the show, and some people actually didn't like the show. But they pretty much kept all of that from us. Our immediate executives who were handling us, who were very much in support of the show, never gave us any indication that there was any sort of trouble, because they were very happy with the work, and they thought the work was what they wanted for the show. So I think they were just waiting it out, and they didn't want to bother us.
A lot of us are familiar with Joss Whedon's experience with Firefly on Fox, in which the network ordered the series changed. Did you have any notes about changing things?
Fuller: No. There was always the caution of make sure that she's likable, and I think likable is a very interesting word, because it's fairly broad in its definition. I like people when they're kind of surly and direct. So if they're not that way then I don't find them likable. It all depends on how you define likable. So I think that was one of the issues. That was one of their major concerns. It was like, "Make this character likable and relatable." And I think we found that balance for what the network was looking for in terms of having a relatable character and also having a character that was a little out of the ordinary and a bit of an antihero.
Talk about what happened with Dead Like Me and why you left that show. (Fuller created the Showtime series, but quit after only three episodes.)
Fuller: Oh, my God, that's like a half-hour conversation. There were so many factors involved in that, not the least of which was Wonderfalls. And it got to the point where I think fundamentally we saw the show different ways. I saw the show differently than the network and the studio. They wanted something that was a little more like Touched by an Angel, where George is helping a client of the week every week. And I wanted to tell a story of a girl who made mistakes every week and learned from those, as opposed to helping somebody and learning from that. That seems to me to be a more realistic life experience, especially when you're dealing with a young girl who is living out the life interrupted in many ways. But it's interesting. This show's given me perspective on that experience. And I think it was the best thing to come over here and do Wonderfalls.
Are you able to do things in Wonderfalls that you weren't able to do in Dead Like Me?
Fuller: Yes. Yes, and I think a lot of that goes toward the financial support that Fox and Twentieth [Century Television] have given this show. Showtime and MGM just would not invest financially in Dead Like Me, and it made it very difficult to produce. And that was probably the root of most of our problems and most of our clashes, was that they saw the show as Dawson's Creek, with talking heads, and budgeted it appropriately. And I had always been saying, "No, we're going to have a death sequence." If you show them this death sequence in the pilot where you have this elaborate bank robbery and then a train wreck, it's like The Incredible Hulk. He has to Hulk out in the episode, and you have to pay for the Hulk-out. And they just never really got on that bandwagon and didn't want to invest in the show that way. That was the big issue.
How do you feel about being in the so-called death timeslot on Fox, Fridays at 9 p.m.?
Fuller: I'm actually really excited about it, because it lowers expectations in terms of what we're going to garner for a rating, and it was good enough for The X-Files. The X-Files kicked ass for two years in that timeslot. And I remember everybody bitching when it was moving to Sunday, like, "How dare they? I can't watch TV on Sunday." And now it's like the most-watched night on television. So I think what's going to be really important to this show is that we have critical support from you guys to bring people to the series, and that's a challenge, and that's why we're like, "Call my office. I'll give you DVDs." Because we want to get people watching the show.
Tim Minear, do you see any similarity between this and Angel, or are they completely different?
Minear: No, they're not different, actually. The similarity I see is that it's the same kind of storytelling that I've been doing. There are elements of the fantastic. There are elements of humor. It's an hour. In a way, it might have more in common with Buffy [the Vampire Slayer], but in fact I didn't work on Buffy. But I learned so much at Angel and at Mutant Enemy [Joss Whedon's production company], and I really brought that whole aesthetic, I think, to this show. I mean, the way we break stories is the way I break them over there.
Having seen Dead Like Me and Bryan Fuller's weird sensibility, it seems like this show has some elements of that, too.
Minear: Absolutely. I feel like it is sort of the lighter side of Dead Like Me. There are many similarities, not the least of which is that both stars are sort of young, disaffected Gen-Y girls. And they both have a foot, so to speak, into some kind of supernatural reality that people around them maybe don't. So, yeah, there is a similarity there.
And also, he's a hack. He's got one idea. He casts a blonde in one and a brunette in the other, and he thinks he's going to get away with it. Like no one's going to notice. He's a hack. You can print that [laughs].
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