tvguide.com - [TV Guide]#C#C: "April 5, 2004
Jaws didn't exactly drop upon hearing the news, first reported on the website of executive producer Tim Minear, that Wonderfalls has been sent down the river for good after its first airing in its impossible new Thursday time period. A really sick April Fool's joke it turned out to be for those of us still hopeful that offbeat shows of distinction can still have a future on network TV. Airing against new episodes of hotter-than-ever The Apprentice and the juggernaut CSI, what chance did this quirky little show have? None, as it turns out.
The floodgates of woe once again have opened and poured into my e-mailbox since news of this got out Friday night. People have been expressing dismay at Fox's hasty ax-wielding as well as a general lack of confidence in network TV's ability to sustain, promote and support fragile risk-takers that revel in wonderment as opposed to the reality-TV norm of exploitative debasement. Case in point: those ghastly promos for The Swan, which unlike Wonderfalls, is getting the initial boost of being launched behind an American Idol results show and thereafter moves to Mondays, when more people might presumably be available to watch Fox than on either Friday or Thursday, the dead-end nights where Wonderfalls was banished.
I'm sympathetic to the doomsayers, and I was a fan of Wonderfalls' peculiar if uneven charms, but I'm also not fooling myself into thinking that even if Fox had treated the show better, or perhaps scheduled it on Mondays as a lead-in to The Swan, that it would have survived the long haul. Wonderfalls was a tricky show at best, and not every episode was a winner. This just wasn't the right time to even try something so out of the norm. Fox's target audience of young adults has shown less inclination to embrace challenging shows l"