Wonderfalls: Pilot

This episode is also known as "Wax Lion", it took me almost 2 years and 5 TiVo tries to watch this episode. For the last few days everytime TiVo tried to record this episode the cable channel LOGO was cut or off-air, it may be a Republican conspiracy. I've now watched this episode thrice and I know why it failed, more on that later.
24 year old Jaye Tyler played by the bi-lingual Caroline Dhavernas is working as a cashier in a Niagara fall souvenir shop. She has a philosophy degree from Brown and chose to do nothing with her life. A high schooler, "mouth breather", is her boss, her best friend is a cool black chick and she has a closeted-lesbian sister, a jerky brother, a snooty mom and a psychiatrist father.
After having a customer be rude with her she steps outside and chokes on a sandwich, finds a quarter, throws it at the Maid of the Mist statue it bounces off both their heads and glows in the wishing fountain.
The story of Niagara of the statue was given by explaining that a Native tribe was giving gifts to the god in the falls and upped the ante to the chiefs hot daughter, the god was so happy he vowed to protect the area forever.
After her near death experience she returns to the shop where the rude customer tried to return a defective wax lion and the lion warned her against giving the rude-one her 10% discount. Jaye does anyway and the rude-one gets mugged. Jaye then faints.
At her trailer park home her family rallies and makes her feel worse. She goes to a therapy and steals the doctor's brass monkey, that monkey monkey, because it told her to. At her bar hang out she meets a new recently dumped bartender and they flirt. Back at work the delivery guy is her next wax lion target and she follows him to a squaking quarter, it leads to the purse of the rude-one. She tries returning the purse to the rude-one and gets in a fight instead. Her sister bails her out and all she got was a small thank you.
The next day wax lion forces her to set-up a blind date with delivery guy and sister. The date goes horribly wrong and the sister is outed as a lesbian. This brings Jaye and her sister closer together and everyone involved has a new love interest. The next day Jaye is happy until a barrel bear hints that she should help another women at the fountain.
The entire series is now available here Wonderfalls on DVD.

Best banter of the show:
Black chick: ".... like when the Native Americans,"
Jaye: "Indians!"
Black chick: "Like when Indians say."

I got the second episode on TiVo and will watch it soon.
Now the reason that this show failed was the special effects, yup, Sabrina the Teenage Witch used an obviously fake cat but it did exist. Wonderfalls used CGI computer effects and that has never worked outside from sci-fi, Lost should be warned that smoke-monster was not good. That and the premise conflicted with Joan of Arcadia. Also in not just animal figurines that talk to her it's anything that has an animal on it, like the squawking quarter.