Too Good for TV?

A Talk with Wonderfalls' co-creator Bryan Fuller

[This interview is a much longer version of one that ran in Soap Opera Weekly. Fuller also created the cable series Dead Like Me, and worked extensively on Star Trek: Voyager. (If you came here looking for more Lucy-related articles, just hit the "back" button on your browser.) — MAK.]

"People don’t want to take anyone else’s sloppy seconds. (Laughs.) In the network world, if someone’s had it, it’s sloppy."
– Bryan Fuller, Wonderfalls

MK: First of all, I want to say how sorry and disappointed I am that Showtime canceled Dead Like Me.

BF: Thank you.

MK: I worship that show.

BF: Cool!

MK: And I thought it was really just hitting it’s stride. Any chance that you might shop around to other networks?

BF: Well, they are shopping around to everybody, I think. They’re going to be actively looking for a home. You know, the obvious places. I’m trying to think of any place else that would be a big market for it and the Sci-Fi Channel seems the most obvious, but it’s contingent on a lot of things for the Sci-Fi Channel. You never know. People kind of don’t want to take anyone else’s sloppy seconds.

MK: That show’s anything but sloppy!

BF: (Laughs.) In the network world, if someone’s had it, it’s sloppy. So, it’s not impossible. It’s been done before, but it definitely is not the likeliest of scenarios.

MK: Well, Wonderfalls was also a favorite of mine, so, of course, it was canceled. How would you describe the series?

BF: The best way to describe it is that it's about a young woman who’s chosen not to engage the world, then being grabbed by the collar by the universe and shaken, and forced to engage and basically have her sanity challenged to make her a better person. [In the show, Jaye, who works at a souvenir shop in Niagara Falls, starts hearing voices from the (previously) inanimate objects in the shop, like a lion figurine. The voices urge her to help various people solve their particular problems. Jaye resists at first, but gets drawn in to these strangers' lives.]

MK: What was your inspiration?

BF: [Co-creator] Todd Holland and I sat down; we had talked about several concepts for the show and we kept on coming back to Joan of Arc, and how there was a young woman who received messages from a higher power and embraced them and followed through. I have a huge aversion to saccharine sweetness. For me, it’s dishonest because you’re forcing an emotion that doesn’t, sort of, exist naturally in that state, so to get around that we had a heroine who had no interest in helping people, but was forced, and so she’s being coerced by the universe to become Fate’s bitch.

MK: What was your target audience for that initially? Did you even think about it?

BF: Really, the target audience for anything that I’ve written is...me. So, when I was at Star Trek Voyager’s last year, I was really eager to get out and do something new and different. The question I asked myself was, “What kind of show would I watch?” I think for a writer, if you are writing a show that you wouldn’t watch, you have the wrong job.

MK: Was there are a big production challenge to face with Wonderfalls?

BF: The initial production challenge was that the studio, the network, saw it as a small-budgeted show, and since there are effects in every time we see one of the creatures talking, we’re talking about...anywhere from a $15,000 to $20,000 dollar budget hit. Because we have to do a CG model, and do all this R&D to have the character come to life, and every subsequent time we see that character talk, it’s another five grand, so what we found ourselves doing is that the character would often repeat the same phrase because we couldn’t afford it to say anything else.

MK: That’s a creative solution. Was there a reason that you picked the particular talking inanimate objects you used on the series?

BF: Well, for the lion initially, Todd and I were talking, and we both had fond memories of the little wax animals that you get at the zoo when you put $2 into the machine and it makes them right then and there, and they’re warm in your hand and you get to go home with them. So, there was something innocent and sweet about this little creature and yet deviant since it’s looking at you and talking to you. There was some fun in perverting something so innocent and child-like, in a fun way.
      The other talking animals from the series usually had something to do with the guest character that Jaye was helping. Like, in [the episode] "Karma Chameleon," with the chameleon puppet, that episode was about a girl who didn’t know who her identity was; the wound-up penguin was about a nun who was unspooling over a crisis of faith. “Crime Dog” was about Jaye committing a crime. They had some sort of thematic tie-in to what the story was, and to what Jaye was going through in each of the stories, so that was always fun, because of the double entendres!

MK: When the show debuted, there were inevitable comparisons to Joan of Arcadia…though in Wonderfalls Jaye doesn’t talk to God explicitly. Do you think that the success of Joan hindered Wonderfalls' chances at all?

BF: I definitely think there was a sticky situation — Fox decided to hold onto the show for so long because they didn’t know what to do with it, and holding on to it (and really not understanding it and how to promote it), it became much more like that show [Joan of Arcadia] than it actually was, because they chose to go after that track. “Oooh! Joan of Arcadia was a success! Let’s make this show seem like that show.” And it really wasn’t. Whenever you force a show to become something that it’s not, you’re going to create a chasm between you and your audience that’s very difficult to get across. If they come to the show expecting chocolate and you give them caramel, they’re gonna be, like, “Where’s that chocolate?”

MK: Have you learned anything from daytime or nighttime soaps about arcing storylines and recurring characters…because you use them so well on the show.

BF: My feeling in terms of telling stories with characters on television is that you have a regular cast of people that you’re going to tune in to see every week. You want to see them grow, and in order for them to grow you have to push them in [certain] directions and continue to push them, as opposed to dropping stories and picking them up later or not picking them up at all. We all get attached to people we see and we like to see where they’re going, so the arc of storytelling is almost like an organic process to TV. More so now, with HBO series being very serialized, and with shows like Lost and Desperate Housewives that are re-embracing the nighttime soap opera of it all. Also, what helps is that we’ve gotten into DVD.
      Before, the whole thing was about..."Every story has to be contained within the hour that the story is told, and that’s that, because it has to play in syndication, and so they can switch around the episodes in any order that they want to." But with DVD, people are purchasing seasons of shows as if they were a novel, as a story that goes on beyond the hour of each individual episode…which I love because I’m with those characters to see them change and grow and become different people as a result of their experiences.
      One of the frustrating things about working on Star Trek was that we always had to hit the "magical history eraser button" at the end of every episode, and bring the characters back to where they were at the beginning. It just was not satisfying, because that’s not how people work. If you’re going to have a huge experience, a life-changing experience — and we’re telling dramatic stories so chances are they’re all going to be somewhat life-changing — you want to see the effect on that person. We all go through traumatic things in our lives, or impactful things in our lives, and we change as a result. If characters aren’t changing, they don’t read as real as they should.

MK: Don’t you think that, especially this season, the audience has shown that it'll watch a serial drama, i.e. Lost and Desperate Housewives, if it’s well-written and performed?

BF: Absolutely, absolutely! Those shows are fantastic. It really has reinvigorated audiences. It’s made people interested in television again. I think we got to a point where people were so used to dry procedurals because those stories stood alone as little contained stories. You weren’t there for the characters, you were there for the plot. I watch TV for the characters and what networks are waking up to is...so do other people.

MK: Did you ever worry that Wonderfalls was too good for TV?

BF: (Laughs.) That never occurred to us because we were just trying to make the show that we wanted to watch and that we would enjoy. It being "too good for TV" seems like a weird thing to say because we’re just trying to tell good stories. It wasn’t any kind of elitist kind of thing where we were trying to alienate part of the audience. We had our initial marketing meeting for the show and with networks, they usually get behind one or two shows a season and launch ‘em like a movie.
      When we sat down for our meeting at Fox and we learned that we weren’t one of those shows that was going to be launched in any way, shape, or form, and that our big premiere party was being invited to the American Idol party, and that we were on at Fridays at 9 [typically not a huge TV-watching night], we figured “Wow, well, we’re probably not long for this world, so let’s tell a story that is going to be contained within 13 episodes, and let’s make it as satisfying as we possibly can because we’re not coming back for season two.”

MK: Interesting. Was there a plan for the series in terms of the plot?

BF: Well, there was definitely a longterm plot for the show. There were storylines set up in the first season almost in every other episode that were building on character arcs going down the road. We had an episode where Jaye’s lesbian sister broke up with her girlfriend and then the girlfriend had sex with her ex-husband and then the lesbian sister comes back and says, “I was wrong. I want you and I want you in my life” and then they have sex...that was kicking off a whole miracle birth arc in the second season.
      We would’ve established that there was active semen in her girlfriend…when she had sex with her, so the active semen got from her girlfriend into her…and she got pregnant because the girlfriend couldn’t get pregnant, and so the whole circuitous Wonderfalls of it all was that here are these two people who got a divorce and one of their issues was that they couldn’t have kids. This is the way of the universe (sort of) working out their problem and giving them a child through a lesbian Republican who really didn’t want kids. So, there were those kind of circuitous fun stories that [would've] kept on paying off.

MK: How’d you go about casting the show? Were you happy with how that turned out?

BF: This was one of those casts that, across the board, I want to work with all of these people again because they brought so much to the table. When you write something, it’s in your head and it exists on a certain level, but once you marry with an actor who speaks those words and they add their magic or creativity to it, it becomes something else. So, it was interesting to watch the Pilot and see those actors speaking the words in a vacuum, and then watch how they learned their cadences and improved things.
      Then, in the series, using that and making the characters, the show and the stories better because you understand the dynamic — everybody’s playing, so it can only improve from that point because you play to people’s strengths. Before, you’re writing in a vacuum and you don’t know who you’re writing for, but after that you understand, and you can make it that much better. That’s why I think every subsequent episode of Wonderfalls gets better and better and better.

MK: In terms of the 13-episode arc...would a fan like myself, watching the DVD set, be satisfied at the end of the 13th episode?

BF: I think you’ll be totally satisfied at the end of the 13 episodes. It really exists as a contained story. There’s a definite beginning, middle, and end where there are story turns that twist in upon themselves, that take the characters in directions you don’t quite expect, and, when all hope looks lost, you have a happy ending that is very satisfying.

MK: Do you think Wonderfalls would ever make it back to TV in any form?

BF: I don’t know about TV. There’s definitely been interest expressed for Todd and I to develop a feature pitch around the show, so we’ve been working on that between the other television development projects that we’re doing. Whether it comes to fruition is hard to say. I’m praying that Joss Whedon’s Firefly movie does gangbusters, because it would help our case [Firefly was a similarly cancelled cult sci-fi TV show]. It would also show that good storytelling isn’t necessarily limited to television, that these [types of] stories can translate and fill up a bigger screen. If you’re telling good stories with good characters, then you’re starting from a great place.

MK: You have a two-year deal with Fox that started in April 2004. Is that still on?

BF: Yes!

MK: Is anything developing now?

BF: Well, my deal is with 20th, which is the studio production entity associated with the network, so that doesn’t necessarily make me exclusive to the Fox network. This year I’m developing an hour -long comedy for NBC called The Assistants and it’s about the assistants who work behind-the-scenes in the corporate offices of a Dr. Phil-type talk show, except Dr. Phil’s much more like Bill O’Reilly and kind of a sonofabitch. It’s about being kind to others and what happens when you shit on your assistant one too many times. I’m excited about it.

MK: Thank you so much for your time.

BF: No problem, thank you!