Marc's 2nd Blog

Wonderfalls That Never Was

Bryan Fuller, co-creator and co-executive producer of the short-lived Fox fantasy series Wonderfalls, told SCI FI Wire he'd developed stories for a second season that never came to pass, as Fox pulled the show after just four low-rated episodes. Caroline Dhavernas starred as Jaye, a bright young woman who worked at a Niagara Falls gift shop and thought she'd lost her mind when inanimate objects at the store suddenly started talking and prodded her to intercede in the lives of people she didn't know. The full 13-episode series, including nine episodes that never aired in the United States, is now out on DVD.

"Actually, I [developed] four episodes of a second season while we were in post-production on the first season, before we knew definitively we were going to be canceled," Fuller said while promoting the DVD collection. "It was like, 'Well, let's get this going just in case, so we can hit the ground running and be ahead of the game should we get picked up.'"

Fuller added: "So there were four stories. The big thrust of the second season was going to be a miracle-birth arc, with Sharon [Katie Finneran], the lesbian sister. We set that up in a [first-season] episode called 'Safety Canary,' where she breaks up with her bisexual girlfriend, who then goes back to her husband and has sex with him. After they've had sex, Sharon comes back to her bisexual girlfriend and says, 'I want to still be with you,' and then they have sex. So the semen in the bisexual girl's vagina gets into lesbian Sharon's vagina and she becomes pregnant, though she's never had sex with a man. So the whole arc of season two was going to be this miracle birth/Jesus arc and Jaye coming to the conclusion she may be a little bit of a prophet.

"And we had another first-season episode, 'Cocktail Bunny,' that was setting up arcs for season three," Fuller continued. "It's one of those things where it's not on the drawing board or in the bible or the book. It's just all in my head. When the characters become real to you, you start fleshing out a future for them that, like a future for anybody, may or not be."

The Wonderfalls DVD includes featurettes, commentaries and a music video. Fuller, who is currently developing an animated series for SCI FI Channel based on the Mike Mignola comic book The Amazing Screw-On Head as well as an hourlong drama for another network, joked that while the Wonderfalls collection "ain't no Lord of the Rings special extended edition," he's nevertheless thrilled that fans have the opportunity to watch the series in its entirety.

"There's big satisfaction," Fuller said. "You want your art to be available to an audience. Now that the show is available on DVD it's available to an audience. That's huge. They have to seek it out, but they can go to a store or Netflix it and have it brought to their door. To be honest with you, I think the show got better with every episode, and there were nine episodes that no one saw. I guess there are a couple of weaker ones where I'd go, 'Ooh, we could have nailed the script better on that,' but overall I really do think the episodes got better. So anyone who checks it out on DVD, if they liked what they'd already seen of the show, will hopefully agree with me and find that it gets better with each episode."
Sci Fi Wire -- The News Service of the Sci Fi Channel