Wonderfalls series#

Dhavernas is just adorable with her open face, blue eyes and weirdly big mouth frequently contorting into endless expressions of stunned incredulity. It+was+never+a+pretty+sight+when+Mr.+Creosote+came+to+dine. But when it works, which is most of the time, Wonderfalls is a quirky charmer of a show that may've improved its consistency with time and tuning. This isn't to say that the show tracked a straight diagonal line into terra firma - it didn't, but it definitely had some dips and ebbs in consistency. Same thing for Wonderfalls - its fans never saw it decline over time, so they cherish it in its best form, its early episodes. If you didn't see the 'fat Elvis in Vegas' years, you'd think he was lean and mean to the end. That's like saying that Elvis' life and career was great based on the part ending with his '68 comeback show.

Wonderfalls series#

The loud praise for the series as a whole has been coming from people who only saw the first third of its run. Also, the quirky animal muse and chain reaction plotting precipitously drops off as more traditional - and boring - storylines encroach in the later going. (If you're sensing a 'but' may be coming, you're right.) The arch manner of her family members and their tart banter is nicely nasty.Īnything+in+my+teeth? But… ….over the entire series, it doesn't develop much and their one-note characters begin to become one-dimensional and grating. It's easy to understand how this whimsical show gathered an intense cult following after its short run because the episodes that ran have a witty, surreal snap to them that made it stand out from the typical formula boob tube junk that pollute the airwaves. In despair, he ended up sitting and drinking at The Barrel's bar for so long they gave him a bartending job and he's sleeping in the store room.

Of course there's got to be a love interest and that would be Eric (Tyron Leitso), a sensitive hunk with a wounded soul because he'd come to the Falls on his honeymoon only to catch his wife providing some room service of her own to a bellhop.

She thinks she's going crazy, but relents and starts doing their bidding with the expected wacky consequences. These muses bombard her with cryptic repeated phrases like 'Get her words out,' 'Bring her home,' 'Give it back to her' and 'She's going to kill him,' which don't usually make sense at first or may take on a second meaning later in the show. It doesn't stop there, as eventually she's being hectored by everything from her family shrink's brass monkey bookend and her dad's lawn flamingos to stuffed animals at work and the mounted trout at The Barrel, a restaurant/bar/hangout where her best friend Mahandra (Traci Thoms) waitresses.

Things change after a malformed wax lion starts to speak to her. She's a snarky, bright and sarcastic chick who looks and acts like a cross between a young Demi Moore and Daria of MTV cartoon fame (if you liked Janeane Garofalo before she became an unfunny crank radio host, you'll like Jaye), comfortably stuck in her 'expectation-free zone' and working for an assistant manager she calls 'the Mouth Breather' (Neil Grayston). To say she's the black sheep of her overachieving family is an understatement - her father's a doctor, her mother's an author, her sister's a lawyer and even her brother, an atheist theologian (huh?) working on his doctorate in comparative religion while living rent-free at home, is considered a greater success than her. The center of the show is Jaye Tyler (Caroline Dhavernas), a 24-year-old girl who's putting her philosophy degree from Brown University to good use by wage-slaving at Wonderfalls, a gift shop next to Niagara Falls, and living in a trailer park. However, thanks to an Internet fan campaign, the entire series is now available as Wonderfalls: The Complete Viewer Collection. This was the case with Greg the Bunny, which only had 11 of 13 episodes air before cancellation, and Wonderfalls, which managed to get only 4 of their 13 episodes aired in two murderous time slots before going over the falls into cancellation oblivion. But when a show takes a few too many steps past third base into left field, Fox can also be very quick on the trigger to cap a quirky show prematurely. When the Fox Network wants to create a hip and/or successful show like 24, The O.C., American Idol or Arrested Development, they can be very good at it.