Like all of Bryan Fuller’s wonderful and whimsical television shows, Wonderfalls was quickly canceled. After four episodes, to be exact. That means that it performed even more poorly than Fuller’s great, but also too-quickly-canceled shows, Pushing Daisies and Dead Like Me.

Wonderfalls centers around a recent Brown grad named Jaye Tyler (Caroline Dhavernas). She is sort of the dud of the family in terms of success in that she works at a Niagara Falls gift shop and lives in a trailer. Her sister, Sharon, is a successful immigration lawyer, her brother, Aaron, is a PhD student in comparative religion, her father is a physician and her mother is a bestselling author. They each have a secret downfall, and that is part of the underbelly of this show that makes it so watchable.

Jaye’s talent—her unwilling talent to be more precise—is that inanimate objects tell her what to do. A stuffed animal bear and a plastic, mounted fish tell her that she needs to perform various duties to help people in need. She begs the animals to stop talking to her, but she soon learns that she will be punished if she doesn’t follow their advice.

It’s not quite as good as Pushing Daisies and not nearly as good as Dead Like Me. It seems more commercial somehow, which seems completely off-base since it was canceled so quickly. In fact, it almost feels like it would be a hit if it aired on television today, only seven years later. Jaye’s ability to talk to inanimate object doesn’t seem to predict the show's plot as absolutely as do the careers or abilities of the two lead characters on Fuller's other two shows—the ability to bring people back from the dead and reaping—so perhaps this show isn’t really built quite as well as his other, more successful attempts.

Additionally, the show is really snarky and sarcastic, and Jaye is beautiful, but I wouldn’t really say that she’s particularly likeable. Perhaps that’s why the show really didn’t fly. Airing on Fox in 2004, the creators tried to sell it to The WB and other networks after it was canceled. The rest of the series aired on the gay, digital cable station, Logo, in 2005, and on the British network, Sky1. The show came out in its entirety on DVD in 2005.

What do you think of Wonderfalls? Why do you think that all of Bryan Fuller’s efforts keep getting canceled?