Full of dark humor, death, and quirky and sometimes unlikable characters, it’s a wonder that any of Bryan Fuller’s three shows—Dead Like Me, Wonderfalls and Pushing Daisies—ever made it onto TV at all, let alone onto basic cable. Fuller has amazingly good and amazingly bad luck. The television writer and producer’s shows have all made it onto big name networks, but, like the untimely deaths of many of Fuller’s characters, they’ve met their unfortunate fates long before their rightful time to go.
Bryan Fuller was born in 1969 and graduated from high school in Clarkston, Washington in 1987. He attended Lewis-Clark State College in Idaho, but then transferred to the USC Film School in Los Angeles. His path to television success came in 1997 when he submitted a script for the sci-fi show, “Deep Space Nine,” during an open script call. A longtime sci-fi fan, Fuller didn’t win the contest, but the writers were impressed with his work. They allowed Fuller to pitch his story idea to the show’s producers. The producers loved the idea and eventually created the script for television. After that, Fuller was made a full-time staff writer.
After working for some time, in 2003, Fuller pitched and eventually sold a show originally called Dead Girl to Showtime. The show later became Dead Like Me. The show centers around the afterlife of an 18-year-old named George Lass (Ellen Muth) , who is killed by a flaming toilet seat as it hurtled to earth from a space station. By some trick in the universe, George becomes a reaper after she dies (yes, the kind that takes souls) and the show follows her and her group of reapers pals. George faces many of the same challenges as living young adults—figuring yourself out, working a shitty job, making friends that don’t treat you like crap, being nice sometimes. Fuller left the show in the middle of the first season due to creative differences.
Dead Like Me was cancelled after the second season, but an abysmal direct-to-video movie called Dead Like Me: Life After Death was released in 2009 minus the caring and enigmatic head reaper, Rube, played to perfection on the series by Mandy Patinkin.
In 2004, the next show Fuller created was Wonderfalls in collaboration with Todd Holland. The show focuses on Brown philosophy grad Jane Tyler (Caroline Dhavernas). Jane works in a Niagara Falls gift shop and starts getting messages from various inanimate animal objects (a stuffed bear, a mounted fish, etc…) that tell her to perform good deeds. This one didn’t even make it through a single season on the air.
After Wonderfalls was cancelled, Fuller worked as a writer and co-producer on the hit series, Heroes in 2006, but left to create his own show, Pushing Daisies. The show centers on pie-maker Ned, who can bring things back to life by touching them and then return them back to death by touching them again. The first season was short because of the writer’s strike, but the show was still nominated for twelve Emmy awards, including a nod to Fuller in the Outstanding Writing of a Comedy Series category. The show won three awards including Best Music, Best Editing and Best Direction in a Comedy Series. Despite its critical acclaim and success, Pushing Daisies was cancelled in its second season after only twenty-two episodes.
Despite his string of failures ("failures," really), as of 2009, Fuller is planning a series based on Augusten Burroughs Sellevision about four people who work at a television station.
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