Television Review: Wonderfalls S1E3 - Wound-Up Penguin

[Snowspinner]

This is a tough show to review for me. I adore it. I will be really annoyed when it is cancelled, as it inevitably will be, as they've decided to move it from the Friday night death slot to instead be on opposite The Apprentice and CSI, where it can also do battle with Stephen King's Kingdom Hospital, which has also relocated. To that timeslot. Because apparently the thing to do when your show has crappy ratings is put it on opposite two of the top 10 shows of the season.

In any case, I love the show. It's sharp, it's witty, it makes me laugh. While Gilmore Girls is in repeats, it's the funniest thing on television. But it's tough for me to quantify that love. I mean, I admit, I don't care about the characters. But I don't think I'm supposed to. They're caricatures – they don't try to act for emotional resonance. They try to be funny. And they are funny.

But the show isn't a straight comedy. It's a dramedy. Or, at least, it seems to be trying to do something substantive. The end of this episode – a father discovering a daughter he didn't know he had – clearly tries to evoke something other than laughs. But it doesn't quite work – there's no characters there to actually care about. Furthermore, there's a certain… grotesqueness to the caricatures that makes the whole process of trying to make them sympathetic ever so slightly uncomfortable.

I feel like I'm dumping on this show, but I'm not – I really enjoy it. It's one of my favorite things to watch in a week – up there with Alias, Gilmore Girls, and Angel. But it's very clearly a show that's only had three episodes, and that's still finding itself. But that doesn’t' bother me. Some of my favorite TV shows (Buffy, Angel, The Simpsons) had weak first seasons. But if this is a show in a weak season, I can only imagine what it would be if it were given the chance to develop.

But those shows were all products of a very different time – they were all on second tier networks, early on in the network's life, when they could afford to nurture a show for a few seasons. Fox is the second-place network overall in the ratings now, thanks mostly to their reality programming. They don’t need to develop a hit. And so this show is probably never going to really get off the ground.

Wonderfalls now airs Thursdays at 9/8c on Fox.