The day after “Wonderfalls” made its debut on Fox last March, the creators and cast began visiting a “save our show” Web site. In most cases, such panic would have been premature. But in the case of “Wonderfalls,” the writing on the wall was clear from the start.
Delayed until spring, then assigned an impossible Friday-night time slot, the oddball comedy-drama about a young woman getting cryptic messages from the tchotchkes in a Niagara Falls gift shop drew only 4 million viewers in each of its first two outings. Even to be considered a standard-issue flop, a show has to approach double-digit viewership.
But when “Wonderfalls” was canceled after just four airings, the show didn’t die. Thirteen episodes had already been produced, and now the full series is available as a three-disc DVD box set, complete with a documentary, audio commentary and other juicy extras.
The DVD set “gives me large satisfaction,” said Tim Minear, who was one of the three executive producers of “Wonderfalls” along with co-creators Bryan Fuller and Todd Holland.
“Look, I knew what the realities are,” said Minear, a veteran of “Angel” and “The X-Files” who is now working on the upcoming Fox series “The Inside,” a dark and vaguely “X-Files”-ish drama about a rookie FBI agent who gets into the minds of both victims and villains. “I also know that most shows won’t make it five years or whatever.”
So, when crafting the first 13-episode story arc of “Wonderfalls,” Minear and his colleagues “made sure it was one story that has a conclusion in Episode 13,” he said–thinking, even at the time, that “perhaps these things would live on DVD and [wanting] people to feel that they had a full experience.”
Viewed in its entirety, “Wonderfalls” comes off as a show that, more than anything else, was ahead of its time. The blend of dark comedy and mysterious subtext from Fuller (“Dead Like Me”) and Holland (“Malcolm in the Middle”) feels right at home in a TV universe that has taken so enthusiastically to “Desperate Housewives.” If it had arrived six months later, on–say– ABC, might “Wonderfalls” have also become a phenomenon?
Probably not. Good as it is, “Wonderfalls” is probably too quirky to have ever engaged mass audiences, particularly given its lack of sexy star power. But that same eccentricity makes “Wonderfalls” perfect for the DVD crowd, not just those who have already embraced the show–and have been waiting impatiently for the boxed set–but those who never got around to sampling it during its brief run.
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Edited by Cara DiPasquale ([email protected]) and Kris Karnopp ([email protected])