She comes off like a brainy Parker Posey, with piercing green eyes that betray both rude intolerance and veiled excitement. But still, the talking-animal business is challenging her stubborn realism.Īs Jaye, Dhavernas is as captivating as she is low-key. She prides herself on her strange ways and her detachment, which is why she lives in a trailer park and has a perverse fascination with an overweight neighbor, whom she dubs 'Fatsquach' to her friend Mahandra (Tracie Thoms) and her brother (Lee Pace). She thinks she's going nuts, but then again, she has thought that for a while. A clerk in a tacky Niagara Falls gift shop, Jaye faces chatty baubles everyday - and one snide wax lion in particular. The supernatural twist on 'Wonderfalls' is that animal objects - a cow creamer, for example, or a brass monkey on a therapist's desk - literally speak to Jaye, giving her mysterious clues about how she should behave. And the show's writers aren't out to reform her with magic, so much as to balance her cynicism with a happy life. 'I'm just highly susceptible to guilt.' A 24-year-old slacker with a PhD in philosophy and a master's degree in snark, Jaye spends her days rolling her eyes at idiocy, sentimentality, and her family. 'I'm not nice,' she complains after accidentally doing someone a favor.

Its heroine, Jaye Tyler (Caroline Dhavernas), is far too cynical to take God's teachings on 'Joan of Arcadia' at face value, and she shudders at the thought of being considered a good person. Dolittle,' and maybe even 'Ally McBeal.' It's a mystic chick series, for sure, but it's not about do-gooding in the name of learning holy lessons. It introduces us to yet another hip mystic chick, in the manner of the drab 'Tru Calling,' the sentimental 'Dead Like Me,' and the preachy, sweet 'Joan of Arcadia.' And like the other shows, it takes up the Slayer's multitask of landing the female youth demographic, empowering them with tales of angst, and delivering a supernatural metaphor for growing up.īut 'Wonderfalls' is unique, and it truly belongs in a category of its own, or one that can also hold 'My Mother the Car,' 'Mr. Inevitably, 'Wonderfalls' has to be yoked together with the new spate of post-'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' girl-power shows.

Kate finneran wonderfalls