By Steve Krutzler / 00:00, 27 February 2004 / TrekWeb Features

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Hark! It's a bird, it's a plane--no, it's the second original series from STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE and STAR TREK: VOYAGER writer/producer Bryan Fuller. Since bidding farewell to warp speed and subspace anomalies in 2001, Fuller has charted an impressive post-TREK resume with the NBC remake of Stephen King's CARRIE and the successful original drama DEAD LIKE ME (now entering its second season on Showtime). Fuller's latest project is the dramedy WONDERFALLS, which he co-created with Todd Holland (MALCOLM IN THE MIDDLE, FREAKY LINKS) and executive produces along with ANGEL and FIREFLY writer/producer Tim Minear.

Premiering on Fox March 12th, FALLS possesses a distinct brand of Fuller's unique and--dare we invoke the latest buzzword of the moment--quirky, sense of humor. After all, this is the guy who gave us the VOYAGER classic "Bride of Chaotica!" The episode was no doubt a love letter to the fantastic tales the writer encounters in the comic book haunts of Los Angeles--and what's not to love about 'Jane--err, Arachnia, Queen of the Spider People'? You'll also find his name on DS9's "Empok Nor," the one with a claustrophobic Garak running around an abandoned space station killing people; and "Darkness and the Light," a strong Kira-centric episode in the fifth season. On VOYAGER he brandished his pen on teleplays like "Course: Oblivion" and "Living Witness," two of the more imaginative scripts; as well as "Relativity," "One Small Step," "Friendship One," "Drone," "Flesh and Blood," and "Workforce" (among others).

WONDERFALLS is about a girl who starts receiving messages from souvenirs. Yeah, little trinkets like a wax lion from one of those tourist machines, or a saltshaker with a cow head. No kidding.

"It probably goes back to my own obsession with action figures," Fuller admits, talking to me from his Los Angeles office. The one across the street from a porn studio. "If you liked 'Bride of Chaotica!' you're probably going to like WONDERFALLS. I think the big appeal to a STAR TREK audience is it's strong genre storytelling. There are fantasy elements and there is a whimsical flavor in which our episodes unfold that I think would be very appealing to STAR TREK fans."

Picking up where JOAN OF ARC (don't confuse FALLS for the CBS drama JOAN OF ARCADIA) left off, "whimsical" is WONDERFALLS in a nutshell. It's not about saving the world from the Fortress of Doom every week, but exploring the doom-and-gloom of its lead character, Jaye (Caroline Dhavernas).

"What would it mean if the person who was being called was the last person that you'd want to be called?" Fuller explains of the concept. "A curmudgeon who is a pathological narcissist, who has no interest in helping anybody whatsoever and who now, forced with a gun to her head, sets events into motion that would not necessarily have happened without her, and must essentially become Fate's bitch."

The hate is swelling in you now--oh wait, wrong franchise, anyway... The voice of Jaye oozes from Fuller's brain as he refers to a female dog, a trademark of the character's blunt, scathing verbiage. In the long line of female heroines made popular by BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, Jaye is more of an anti-heroine. Fuller says making his lead character a woman had a lot more to do with creativity than marketability, however.

"The great thing about BUFFY is it did combine these aggressive male traits with a female character and I think that's what Joss Whedon wanted to do," Fuller says. "To have the ditzy cheerleader who usually is the first person to be killed off, be the hero. Jaye's a little bit different in that she's not the ass-kicker; she's scrappy, but she doesn't have superhuman powers, or [at least] they're not physical. It definitely is in that family and comes out of that BUFFY mythology, which opened so many doors in terms of how we see women on television, how we see female characters, and how we can tell stories by melding genres."

"The big interest in the female hero is that I think you have a broader canvas to play with in terms of what people are comfortable seeing that character go through emotionally," he continues. "With a male character you're not going to be able to get as wildly neurotic and emotional as you would be with a woman or female character because our society, for whatever reason, isn't comfortable seeing a man in that position. And if they do then that man is deemed weak and unlikable. We're comfortable seeing women cry but it's a different thing when you see a man cry. I really don't see any of these characters as male or female as much as they're just interesting characters and the venue of having a female character gives you much more freedom of expression in terms of the types of places you can go with that character."

Modeled somewhat after the movies DONNIE DARKO and AMELIE, stories also featuring youths in contact with the otherworldy entities, Fuller and Holland set the show in a locale foreign to the standard television series--literally and figuratively.

"Todd was listening to NPR and they had this special on Niagara Falls," Fuller says. "Paris is such a romantic, fairy-tale setting for AMELIE and really its own character in so many ways. So Niagara Falls felt like it was the American equivalent, even though it is on the Canadian side."

The pilot episode starts out with a creative introduction to the Niagara setting, in which Jaye's Brown University philosophy degree has landed her a clerk job at a tourist shop by the Falls. It's here that wax figurines, coins, and stuffed animals first make the twenty something their bitch. As you can imagine, WONDERFALLS doesn't take itself too seriously, avoiding the kind of explicit identification of the voice in the clouds that the God-centric JOAN OF ARCADIA offers.

"I'm not so comfortable with the use of that word ['God'], although I think we're really saying the same thing," he says. "It boils down to an issue of linguistics. It could be like a collected consciousness, it could be her own insanity speaking through her. Is she psychic? Is she talking to God? Is she a spiritualist? Is she insane? These are the questions that she's constantly burning through in every episode and is slowly starting to get the idea that this is something that, while maybe not tangible, is real."

"I would say we skew much more comedic than we do dramatic," Fuller says when asked about comparisons to ARCADIA. "We have those dramatic elements but it's really kind of a romp. Kind of a romantic comedy romp. It's about a person who's forced to engage with the world around her and things in that world aren't supposed to talk, but they talk to her."

Fuller calls it "grounded fantasy." After four years trekking around the Delta Quadrant, he says he continued his interest in genre work, but was eager to ground it in something a little more realistic. Can you imagine Janeway calling Chakotay her "bitch"? Wait a minute; that's another story entirely.

"I love horror and sci-fi and fantasy but I am also attracted to those elements in a grounded universe," Fuller offers. "For example in STAR TREK, people don't talk like 'people'. They're four-hundred years more evolved, they're stiffer, they don't have as much humor, and they're not as much fun because they're less like us. The thing that I've really been trying to do is take fantastical elements of the story and ground them in our reality so they can still be relatable but hold the charm of the fantastic. It's like trying to open the genre to a broader audience, in a way, and it's also much more fun to write when it is relatable."

The show is also full of visual flourishes you won't find on the Starship Enterprise. Like the point of view of that adorable lion being molded from hot wax.

"Oh yeah, most of that stuff is all in the script," he says enthusiastically. "Like 'rocket zoom to this', 'revealing that', all that stuff is in the scripts. I think Todd and Tim and myself really enjoy storytelling and really enjoy finding different ways to tell stories and different narrative devices into scenes that make them a little more interesting and that just makes it more fun to write. When I sit down at the computer I think, 'what's a way into this scene that hasn't been done before?' Because invariably you're going to find yourself in scenes that you've seen. It's your responsibility as a writer to make that fresh and unique and not just parrot what's been done so many times before."

One episode takes a noir approach, spoofing the classic genre as well as tropes made famous recently by shows like THE X-FILES. Fuller says the network originally had misgivings about "Crime Dog" (each episode is named for the trinket that starts talking to Jaye), because of its non-traditional, noir-esque structure. Minear gets the credit for bringing the Powers That Be around on that one. But, hey, it's a little easier to get your way now that you're a "top dog," right?

"It's just a matter of being more creatively involved and feeling like you have a bigger contribution," he says of the executive producer/co-creator hats. "There's a sense of ownership where I'm directly responsible for this, as is Todd and Tim. We all want to put on a good show, so now maybe the things that I may not have been able to fight for on STAR TREK, I'm able to now. We're all so well-versed in genre storytelling that I think it allows us to turn some things on their ear."

Turning things on their ear used to be a trademark of scripts by a certain producer by the initials B and B.

"Brannon [Braga] is a fantastic writer who on ENTERPRISE is wearing a leash," Fuller says when asked about the series. "You've got this fantastic, creative mind at your disposal, and you put a leash on it. I don't think the show is really a reflection of what Brannon Braga is capable of because I've worked with him very closely and he has an amazing mind and is very creative and he has so many great things ahead of him that don't have STAR TREK in the title. I can't wait for the leash to come off."

With rumors of cancellation and seemingly spiraling ratings, that day could be sooner rather than later. Fuller thinks the "franchise" has plenty of life left in it, however.

"I think the STAR TREK universe is so fertile that I don't think it's ever going to come completely to an end. I think it needs to lie fallow a little bit to rejuvenate."

Fuller hopes visiting WONDERFALLS is, for viewers, like so many of those vacations you wish would never end: one day and you never want to come back.

"I think there is a female appeal because there is that romantic comedy aspect of the show, but it also has a really strong male appeal because the humor can be a little mean-spirited and it definitely doesn't pull any punches," he says. "It tries to avoid going to the schlocky, smaltzy place and uses some mean humor that lets you get away with a little bit more."

Fox's thirteen episodes of WONDERFALLS have wrapped production in Toronto and Fuller and is supervising post-production with Holland and Minear in anticipation of the March 12th debut. He's also working on a script for an animated Sci-Fi Channel project based on Mike Mignola's THE AMAZING SCREW-ON HEAD, "who can screw onto any number of bodies and fights for truth, justice, and the American Way with President Lincoln. It's like WILD WILD WEST on acid."

In other words, it's right up Bryan Fuller's alley.

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Photos: Bryan Fuller on the set of DEAD LIKE ME; "Bride of Chaotica!"; Wax Lion That Talks; Caroline Dhavernas as 'Jaye'

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