“Wax Lion” (season one, episode one; originally aired 3/12/2004)
“So we got Poor Bitch and his ring, which led us to the quarter, which led us to the purse, which was empty. Is that supposed to mean something? Is it a metaphor? Are you Satan? Are you God? If you don’t say anything in the next five seconds I’m going to assume you’re Satan. One-Mississippi, two-Mississippi, three-Mississippi, four-Mississippi… Oh my God. I’m a crazy person.”—Jaye Tyler, “Wax Lion”
It’s hard not to look at Bryan Fuller’s career and feel sorry for the way things have turned out. As a showrunner, his résumé is littered with a considerable amount of failures, and failures that turned out that way through no fault of his own. Critically acclaimed shows he’s created like Pushing Daisies start out strong and taper off midway through, while creative difficulties led him to depart shows like Heroes and Dead Like Me. (Though there is a certain degree of schadenfreude to be felt, as once he leaves a show it tends to spiral out of control, as those show’s later seasons were—putting it charitably—mildly disastrous.) The 2012-13 television season has had some stark examples of that trend, as his Munsters reboot Mockingbird Lane didn’t make it past the pilot stage and his current show Hannibal is a critical darling, but one that lived on the bubble longer than any other network show and only earned a renewal by the skin of its teeth.
Fuller’s projects tend to fail because they’re the sort of works that are too out there for mainstream audiences, and yet they’re exactly the sort of projects that gain a small but devoted following—a following of which I’m proud to be a member. Fuller’s work is distinguished by an odd marriage of aesthetics, a sense of whimsy and wonder that’s balanced out with a fascination with death. His writing and plots have an almost lyrical quality to them, a fondness for alliteration and imagery that at times goes beyond the pale—the various corpses on Hannibal and Pushing Daisies speak to that. Fittingly for this temperament, for whatever roadblocks he’s encountered, he’s always able to bounce back and try something new. Following Fuller’s unceremonious exit from Dead Like Me, he teamed up with two other equally talented individuals: director Todd Holland (Malcolm In The Middle and The Larry Sanders Show) and writer Tim Minear(Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Angel).
From this superstar tag team of showrunners came Wonderfalls, which debuted on Fox in the spring in 2004. Greeted by the media as part of the crop of post-Buffy shows featuring strong female protagonists with mystical inclinations—in addition to Dead Like Me, the 2003-04 season saw CBS’ Joan Of Arcadia and Fox’s Tru Calling—Wonderfalls was also acclaimed by critics as one of the most promising new shows of the season. And like all promising new shows of any season, it was barely watched, mistreated by the network as timeslots were shifted and episodes aired out of order, and the axe fell on it after only four episodes. It was gone in the blink of an eye, a show that left so quickly everyone who followed could only ask regretfully what could have been.
Written by Fuller and directed by Holland, the Wonderfalls pilot “Wax Lion” bears the creative imprints of both of its parents. It feels like a combination of Holland’s work on Twin Peaks and Fuller’s work on Dead Like Me, creating a seemingly normal world on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls shot through with various stylistic deviations and oddities. Cutaway scenes, random slow-motion, and click-transition edits color the mundane activities surrounding this tourist attraction, accentuated by a score that at times takes its cues from lighter pop, traditional African/Middle Eastern music and Angelo Badalamenti-style jazz. The opening scene sets the tone right away, depicting a version of the “Maid in the Mist” legend starring flea market offerings. A View-Master editing style circles through the scenes before transitioning into a lampshade in motion, which sends a Native American chief’s daughter over the falls into a CGI mouth. It’s unique, yes, but it’s not the overly dazzling kind of unique you get from pilots with broader production budgets like Pushing Daisies or Mockingbird Lane. And while I love both, part of me prefers this simpler style, as the lower budget and Holland’s sensibilities hold back the extremes of the Fuller sensibility, which can verge on tiring.
The narrator of this opening scene—and the center of the show’s world—is Jaye Tyler, a disenchanted clerk at the Wonderfalls gift shop who’s living up to her high-school yearbook promise to be “overeducated and unemployable.” A 24-year-old philosophy graduate of Brown University, she has chosen the path of least resistance, not even able to work up the energy to do anything other than chew her peanut-butter sandwich angrily when she’s passed over for assistant manager position in favor of high school “mouth-breather” Alec. “You’re spiteful in a way that the definition of spiteful doesn’t quite prepare you for,” says her best friend Mahandra (Tracie Thoms), a waitress at the local bar. Jaye, on the other hand, sees her course of action as a solution to skip ahead of the perceived drudgery of her more affluent and successful family: “They all work really hard every day and they’re dissatisfied. I mean, I can be dissatisfied without hardly working at all.”
And here we get our central reason to watch: Caroline Dhavernas’ performance as Jaye. Dhavernas has been largely absent from American television since Wonderfalls went off the air, popping up on the short-lived Off The Map before reuniting with Fuller for Hannibal—but what she does here makes me wish she was a more frequent presence. She falls between the other female protagonists of Fuller’s shows, and it’s a mix that works—the disdainful qualities of George Lass without the sullen unpleasantness, the wide-eyed expressiveness of Charlotte Charles without the Manic Pixie Dream Girl-esque quality. Jaye feels like a real person, someone firmly rooted in the unambitious mid-20s, doubts and fears about growing up sublimated underneath a thick coat of sarcasm. And she’s not incapable of emotion either—when The Barrel’s new bartender Eric (Tyron Leitso) tells the story of how his sheet-obsessed wife bedded the bellboy on their honeymoon, she slides him the shot he just bought her without a word. There’s a potential meeting of kindred spirits as he tells her about abandoning his life in New Jersey: “I’m pretty sure they’re gonna fire me if I don’t show up.” “That’s awesome.”
Jaye’s self-proclaimed commitment to mediocrity is upset when a customer returns a defective wax lion from the shop’s Make-A-Mold machine, and what seems like a simple complaint turns into a near-spiritual experience when the slightly smushed lion tilts his head up to the clerk and advises her not to give the customer her money back—advice proven true when the customer is robbed immediately after setting foot outside of the shop. This triggers what will be the two best elements of the pilot, the depiction of the inanimate objects—identified as “muses” by Fuller and Holland on the DVD commentary track—and the looks on Jaye’s face as they keep trying to get her attention. The understated muse animation and Dhavernas’ reactions—bored expressions twisting into shock and horror (and later annoyance)—make a winning combination, as the muses prod Jaye with a series of cryptic statements such as “Ask him about the ring, the one he doesn’t wear” and “See a penny, pick it up” until she responds to their hints. And when she refuses to do so, they channel Michigan J. Frog in a series of ragtime songs and nursery rhymes to either deprive her of sleep or make everyone around her think she’s crazy for hissing at inanimate objects. Her family—sister Sharon (Katie Finneran), brother Aaron (Lee Pace), father Darrin (William Sadler), and mother Karen (Diana Scarwid)—half-heartedly try to help her deal with the shock after she passes out from the first experience, but all this does is give her another muse in the form of her mother’s therapist’s bronze monkey bookend, which she steals because it tells her to.