Wonderfalls Gave Us One of TV's Most Underrated Female Antiheroes

In The Late Great, Primetimer staffers and contributors revisit shows that were cut short, but still cast a long shadow over the TV landscape.

Twenty years ago, a short-lived series from Todd Holland (The Larry Sanders Show, Malcolm in the Middle) and Bryan Fuller (purveyor of cult hits Pushing Daisies and Hannibal) made its debut on Fox: Wonderfalls.

The quirky hour-long show was unlike anything that was airing on television at the time. Network lineups in 2004 tended to be primarily made up of procedurals, sitcoms, teen soaps, and unscripted programming. A whimsical dramedy about an Ivy League graduate who starts receiving guidance from inanimate toy animals in order to dole out random good deeds may have been considered a little too left of center.

Sure enough, Wonderfalls didn’t last long on Fox’s primetime schedule, getting the ax after four low-rated (for the time) weeks following little marketing, a barely promoted time-slot change, and episodes broadcast out of order. Though it hardly registered on the TV radar even while critics praised its cleverness, Wonderfalls amassed a loyal but passionate following — a norm for Fuller’s works — igniting unsuccessful fan-fueled grassroots campaigns to rehome it on another network and a popular “Save Wonderfalls” website frequently visited by cast and producers.

Eventually, the 13 produced episodes were released on DVD, a holy grail for Wonderfalls fans who coveted the full intended viewing experience, and a rare gift for a canceled show to receive such treatment. Triggered by Fox’s early cancellation of another beloved TV series, Firefly, I invested, sight unseen, in the Wonderfalls DVDs. The show played a vital role in my life as I left one stage behind (high school) and prepared to enter another (college). Wonderfalls served as a personal salve during an uncertain and tumultuous time as I began shaping my own identity, introducing me to one of television’s most underrated female antiheroes.

Wonderfalls was, and still is, a singular TV show. The story revolved around an underachieving 24-year-old Jaye Tyler (played by the wonderfully underrated Caroline Dhavernas), who works a dead-end sales job at a Niagara Falls gift shop and lives at the High and Dry Trailer Park, much to the disappointment of her family. A Brown graduate, Jaye is the black sheep of an overbearing-yet-loving, uber-conservative family (I certainly identified with the black sheep part): her sister, Sharon (a delightfully high-strung Katie Finneran), is an ambitious attorney who is secretly a lesbian; her atheist brother, Aaron (Lee Pace, pre-Ned the Piemaker), is a doctorate student studying comparative religion; her meddling father, Darrin (William Sadler), is a respected physician; and her dedicated mother, Karen (Diana Scarwid), is an equally successful travel book writer.

Jaye doesn’t pretend to have her ducks in a row. Rather, the Gen-Y slacker is more interested in self-sabotaging and settling into a comfortable rut than making something out of her listless life, making her a complete 180 from the archetypal TV heroines who seemed to have it all together. At the end of the day, doing things (or not) in her own self-interest is her main priority.

So when she suddenly possesses the supernatural ability to talk to animal figurines, à la Joan of Arc — a wax lion, a brass monkey, and a stuffed bear among them — she reluctantly follows their cryptic messages meant to prompt her to service people in need so she can be spared a spiral into insanity. (Their aggressiveness grows each time she ignores them. And sometimes their suggestions aren’t with the best intentions in mind.) Initially, Jaye fails to see the value in going through with their wants. But she begins to see the silver lining as the series goes on and grows to maybe even like helping others, the results of the good deeds the animal muses have her partake in slowly shifting her cynical perspective on the world and those in her orbit to a much more optimistic place.

She has others in her corner as she begrudgingly embarks on this roller-coaster journey to become a more proactive member of society, carving out an unlikely transformation into that of the reluctant hero. Jaye often confides in her sarcastic cocktail waitress best friend, Mahandra (Tracie Thoms), who usually serves as a voice of reason, and develops a romantic interest in the warm-hearted bartender, Eric (Tyron Leitso), who is the antithesis to Jaye in nearly every way.

While I didn’t have Jaye’s magical powers of communicating with animal figurines in my daily life, she was a flawed character who mirrored a lot of my own feelings and trepidations as I teetered toward adulthood — “overeducated and unemployable,” as Jaye is often described, being one of those concerns. I also hadn’t experienced anyone quite like her on television: an antisocial outsider disinterested and dissatisfied with anything outside her mundane existence, who was rigidly content with being imperfect, apathetic, and misanthropic, at least in the beginning. She was sarcastic, bitter, and sometimes downright mean, a modern reflection of young adults numbed by familial and societal expectations.

In the series’s first episode, “Waxed Lion,” Mahandra asks why Jaye was “performing an act of kindness” in the first place, likely because it was so out of character. Jaye’s response sums her up to a tee: “Just wanted to see what it was like.” To add to the tension, the contrast in belief systems between Jaye and her family members — who all walked the conventional paths of success and looked down on her lack of drive — was so stark it was difficult not to root for her, unlikable qualities and all.

As Wonderfalls progressed, those facades would crumble. Jaye and Sharon’s dynamic started off antagonistic, but it thaws as Sharon helps her sister get out of trouble. Jaye, in turn, keeps Sharon’s sexuality and girlfriend, Beth (Kari Matchett), a secret. This created an influx of potential storylines and conflicts that unfortunately never came to light. “Sharon’s sexuality is only [a] small facet of who she is, although it does inform her being in the closet, not wanting to tell her parents, and all these related issues,” Fuller explained in 2004, recognizing that a prominent lesbian character is “not a point of view that you see often on TV.” Similarly, after being roped into Jaye’s otherworldly abilities, Aaron finds himself at an existential crossroad when he starts questioning his own religious beliefs.

The series ended with a lot of creative life left in its tank; seeds for a weirder Season 2 were planted with the distant dream that one day they would be realized. Though Wonderfalls featured a protagonist whose less-than-rosy views colored her every decision, opinion, and relationship, the show was, for all intents and purposes, interested in leaving Jaye and the other characters happier than they began. The series’s swan song, “Caged Bird,” encapsulated that perfectly. After a chaotic hostage situation puts Jaye, Sharon, and others in grave danger, a domino sequence of stressful events ensues and brings the series to a satisfying conclusion. The final moments involve an emotional Tyler reunion (Jaye no longer chooses to be an outsider in her own family, they welcome her without any more prejudice), a public outing of Aaron and Mahandra’s once-secret romance, and a rekindling of Jaye and Eric’s complicated love connection. It was proof Jaye had something she didn’t have when we met her in the first episode: a bit of hope.

It’s understandable why Fox struggled to adequately promote Wonderfalls or know what to do with this oddball gem while it was on the air. The show was difficult to define in a one-sentence logline, thanks to its seamless mixing of genres, unapologetic dark humor, complex exploration of moralism and spirituality, and spotlighting of a jaded deadpan female antihero. With the value of hindsight, critics collectively declared Wonderfalls to be a TV show gone too soon that deserved more time than it got — an opinion I’ve held since I first watched it. “It was a slow grieving process,” Fuller said of the series’s premature end in a 2015 interview.

Despite its short lifespan, Wonderfalls was a rare example of cleverly executed storylines, whip-smart (and sometimes snarky) dialogue, and fully fleshed-out characters. But times have changed dramatically since, and the world can feel like a more hopeless place than it was in 2004. This show that put its main character through her paces as she unwillingly went on a coming-of-age journey into adulthood asked viewers to accept that having a little faith in ourselves — and others — wasn’t always a bad thing.

Philiana Ng is a Los Angeles-based writer covering TV, celebrity, culture and more. Her work has appeared in The Hollywood Reporter, Billboard, Entertainment Tonight, TV Guide, Yahoo Entertainment, and The Daily Beast, among others.