Relationship Spotlight: Jaye & Sharon Tyler (Wonderfalls)

I wrote about Jaye and Aaron ages ago, and they remain my favorite Tyler sibling duo, but Jaye and Sharon are pretty fun, too.  As with Jaye and her brother, the two sisters’ relationship is wildly dysfunctional but, at the same time, oddly compelling.  The character interactions on this show really take it beyond a quirky curiosity about a young woman who hears inanimate objects talk to her and make it real.  Jaye and Sharon are a prime example of that.

Jaye and her sister don’t have what you’d call a warm relationship.  They’re not close – Jaye tries to avoid everyone in the family as a rule, but when she and Sharon are in the same sphere, Jaye’s sarcasm starts working overtime.  As a type-A immigration lawyer, Sharon is light years past slacker Jaye (a retail clerk) in terms of grown-up pursuits.  Sharon has worked hard to get where she is, and not just in her professional life; she frequently casts herself in the martyr-ish role of the family savior, the one who bends over backwards to accommodate the others and cleans up the messes of more wayward members like Jaye.  This career and familial pressure – and extreme closetedness – have left Sharon tightly-wound, practically brittle.

Jaye, meanwhile, has cultivated an “expectation-free zone” for herself.  Unlike her family of overachievers, she prefers to live well below her potential.  She enjoys the way she exasperates Sharon; however, there’s also a little part of her that kind of resents how seemingly put-together Sharon is, which complicates their interactions.  Although Jaye is determined to keep her life from moving forward, she doesn’t like her sister looking down on her and wears her retail vest with a surly chip on her shoulder.

Of course, Jaye’s days of inaction are coming to a close.  Everything changes when the inanimate objects around her start pestering her to do things, and this is when Jaye and Sharon’s relationship starts to soften, little by little.  Some it comes from external prodding; it’s one of Jaye’s tchotchke consciences who first urges Jaye to say “I love you,” to her sister.  The fact that Sharon is accidentally outed to Jaye also plays a part in their relationship.  While Aaron is the only one in the family who learns Jaye’s secret, Jaye is the only one who knows Sharon is a lesbian.  As self-involved as Jaye can be, I think having a secret of her own allows her to empathize, at least a bit, with Sharon’s situation.  She’s supportive in her own snarky Jaye way, and even though I daresay Sharon sometimes wishes Jaye had never found out, it’s good for her to have someone in the know.

Even though Sharon and Jaye continue to clash, sometimes enormously, Jaye pretty consistently turns to Sharon when she needs help, and Sharon rarely disappoints.  Whether it’s a way out of a legal jam or some coaching through a difficult conversation, Sharon is there for her little sister (often complaining throughout and pointing out that she can’t just drop everything because Jaye can’t sort her own crap out.)  Aaron is more of an emotional support for Jaye, trying to get her to open up about what’s going on with her, and Jaye and Sharon definitely don’t have that kind of relationship, but Sharon provides support in a different way, serving as a reluctant-but-dependable protector/advisor/lifeguard.  Though Jaye isn’t the best at reciprocating (she usually needs a push to go out of her way for anyone,) she at least starts to recognize all that her sister does on her behalf and begins to understand why Sharon acts so uptight.  Baby steps, but considering where they are at the start of the series, not bad at all.

Relationship Spotlight: Aaron & Jaye Tyler (Wonderfalls)

 

Strictly speaking, Wonderfalls is my least favorite Bryan Fuller show, but that speaks more to the quality of the other series than to the faults of this one.  I get that it can be a little to insular for its own good, and that Jaye’s acerbity sometimes overtakes her better traits, making it hard to relate to her.  Still, it’s a highly original, entertaining series in its own right, and nowhere is it more successful than in the various Tyler family dynamics.

 

The Tylers are great because you can pick any two members and find a distinct and believable dynamic between them.  This is rare enough on TV, even more so when the show doesn’t actually center around the entire family – while Jaye’s parents and siblings get plenty of screentime and characterization, the youngest Tyler very squarely drives the narrative.  I like pretty every character combination within this family, but my favorite remains the brother-sister duo of Aaron and Jaye.  Caroline Dhavernas and Lee Pace have pitch-perfect sibling chemistry, and the writing for these two is fun, funny, and endlessly interesting.

 

Like most of Jaye’s relationships on the show, her interactions with Aaron change considerably over the course of the far-too-short series.  At first, Aaron, while mildly ridiculing of her “trailer park, hillbilly lifestyle,” doesn’t concern himself much with Jaye, and that’s the way the antisocial retail clerk likes it.  She thinks her family spends way too much time in her business and appreciates that Aaron doesn’t bug her about her life or her increasingly-odd behavior.

 

Until the day Aaron catches her talking to his mother’s cow-shaped creamer (quick tutorial for the uninitiated:  at the start of Wonderfalls, inanimate objects – usually animal tchotchkes – begin talking to Jaye, giving her cryptic instructions that ultimately lead to helping others.  Only Bryan Fuller, people.)  Suddenly, he’s worried that she’s losing it, and when she tries to bluff her way out of his accusations, he resolutely decides to get to the bottom of it.

 

This is where the good Jaye-Aaron stuff really starts.  Aaron is almost more concerned that Jaye won’t confide in him than that she was talking to the cow creamer in the first place.  Though admittedly out of practice, he wants to protect her and gets upset that she won’t let him in.  From here on out, Aaron is the closest thing Jaye has to a confidante – one she doesn’t want, one that she spends a fair amount of time trying to avoid, but a confidante none the less.  When she’s at her most desperate, it’s Aaron that she turns to.

 

Not that either of them turn into Siblings of the Year.  No, a lot of their entertainment value comes from their oddly-compatible dysfunctionality.  Both frequently snipe and insinuate at one another, having unspoken conversations in the middle of family game nights or fondue fests that fly under the others’ radar.  Jaye’s sullen snarkiness goes well with Aaron, who tends to vacillate unpredictably between in-control laidback and panicked.  And, like all Tyler relationships, when the chips are really down, they’re there for each other.  I think of “Crime Dog,” where, despite implying pretty hard himself that Jaye is off her rocker, Aaron is quick to defend her against someone else side-eyeing her mental health.  And when Aaron’s championing gets him in trouble, Jaye jumps in with a less-tactful rebuttal of her (it involves her fist.)  She’s as surprised as anyone to discover it, but “you don’t screw with [her] family.”

How Hannibal Fits Fuller

At first, Hannibal seems out of place among Bryan Fuller’s other shows – Dead Like Me, Wonderfalls, Pushing Daisies, and the pilot for Mockingbird Lane.  It’s darker, more gruesome, and less fantastical.  With the other four shows, it’s immediately clear that they’re from the same showrunner, and Hannibal appears the odd man out.  However, Fuller’s latest work shares a number of threads with his previous efforts.  Here are the Fuller-esque elements in Hannibal.

Extreme Foodiness

 

Dead Like Me had Der Waffle Haus, Pushing Daisies had The Pie Hole, and Hannibal has the good doctor’s kitchen.  Rather than dwelling on greasy-spoon breakfast food or mouthwatering dessert, Hannibal is all about ostentatious gourmet fare.  True, it’s all made of people, but it looks amazing, and Hannibal is the most verbose TV foodie since Rube.

Sumptuous Visuals

 

Because it’s not as brightly-colored as Fuller’s other shows, Hannibal’s visual feast is subtler than that of its fellows.  Still, the attention to color, detail, and eye-catching mise-en-scène is undeniably there.  Look at the saturated sunlight when Will imagines himself fly-fishing and the twisted beauty of the macabre murder tableaus.  Speaking of which…

 

Inventive Deaths

 

While I’ve yet to see anyone on Hannibal die from a water-cooler bottle or a scratch ‘n’ sniff bomb, the killers in the D.C. area are a creative bunch.  There’s the human mushroom garden, the corpse totem pole, and the color palette of dead bodies used for a mural.  Hannibal himself gets in on the fun regularly.  My personal favorite is the man turned into a human tree, with his torso opened to show that his organs have been swapped out for precisely-arranged flowers.

 

Psychological Themes

 

Jaye saw Dr. Ron, Chuck baked antidepressants into pies, and Reggie visited child psychiatrists after George’s death.  Hannibal, meanwhile, is full of psychology.  In addition to Hannibal (therapist and psychopath – a twofer!) we have Drs. Bloom, Chilton, and Du Maurier, along with a plethora of psychopaths and people with other disorders.  Plus, Will works with the FBI’s behavioral science unit.  Hallucinations, hypnosis, and psychoanalysis, oh my!

Exceptional Dialogue

 

Like the visuals, this parallel is less obvious.  Hannibal doesn’t use the whimsical wordplay of Pushing Daisies, but the dialogue is remarkable in quieter ways.  Will and Abigail’s extended metaphors on hunting and fishing are excellent, and I don’t think I’ve heard a more plaintive description of cancer than Bella’s story about a stray cell that got lost and is simply doing what it does best.  More recently, Margot’s explanation of having “the proclivity for the wrong parts” artfully says everything you need to know about her sexuality and her family’s opinion about it.