I Watched ‘Wynonna Earp’ 2 Years Late

I guess you could say I’m 7 years late, given that this show started in 2016.  And “late” is probably not the best wording, as it can only be a good thing when new people continue to discover a show in the years after its original run.  I just wanted to specify that this is not a re-watch, this is me watching the show for the first time.

In my Class of ’09 / Daisy Jones blog post from May, I talked about how in the past couple years, it’s been nearly impossible for me to find TV shows (or movies for that matter) that really deliver the things I’m looking for.  It’s not that good stuff doesn’t still exist, it’s just that there’s a genre of TV that does a great job scratching a particular itch for me, that seems to be in short supply these days.  I think to some extent it’s a casualty of the move from traditional cable and broadcast TV to streaming.  And it really bums me out.

So what “itch” am I referring to?  Well, first off, there are plenty of genres I’m into that I think are still in good supply.  For example, I don’t feel like I’m hurting for good half hour comedies.  Am I?  Thinking about it now – Right now we’re watching Dave on Hulu (one of these stupid situations where it’s an “FX show” that never actually airs on FX, it only streams on Hulu).  It’s really funny so far, and it has 3 seasons (as of this writing), so there are plenty of eps to consume.  We’re also watching season 387 of Always Sunny, which still delivers pretty well.  And we just finished S2 of Somebody Somewhere which is always good … OH and Beef!  How could I forget, this one was really enjoyable as well.  Point being, half hour comedy as a genre still feels relatively healthy.

And then there are the prestige shows like The Bear and The Last of Us.  These shows are great, and they entertain me perfectly well, but it’s a different type of entertainment than the “itch” I refer to above.  These shows fall more into the Breaking Bad category, where I get pumped up to watch them and I love the characters, but I don’t relate to them quite to the extent where I’m thinking a lot about the show after the fact.  They don’t necessarily inspire me to write blog posts or analyze them while I’m bored or get irrationally worried about how storylines will play out and what will happen to the characters.  They’re not getting me in the heart parts quite to the extent that they turn me into a raving lunatic.

The shows that get me obsessed to the level of lunacy tend to follow an extremely simple formula: There are one or more compelling lady protagonists who I can relate to and/or live vicariously through, who get to do cool and/or interesting things … and yes I will admit it: preferably there will be one or more cute guys in the mix as love interests.  Heh.  If ass-kicking is involved it really pumps it up an extra notch, but it’s not required.  Yeah I know, it’s stupid basic, but it’s can have pretty wide appeal.  And of course, it has to be a good show with quality writing and actors who can really pull you in and make you care.

I think the formulaic / classic quality of this genre is another reason why these shows are in shorter supply these days – TV creators are trying to branch out and try new things.  Which is great, that’s exactly what they should be doing, I just wish some of these shows could still exist in parallel.  And hell, it’s not as if the formula I mentioned above doesn’t allow for millions of genre and story possibilities.  Shows I’ve loved that have fit this bill have been about spies, musicians, space people, post-apocalyptic people, robots, monsters, demons, cops, future people, past people, every damn thing.  You could still branch out and make nearly any show in the universe and have some of this formula in there.  So I don’t think I’m asking for anything crazy.

I wonder if Wynonna Earp might be one of the last of these types of shows to have existed on basic cable .. if there are many of these getting made anymore on actual TV (as in not streaming), I’m not hearing about them.  Either that or they’re just Riverdale style teeny bopper shows on the CW.  And the ones that get made on streaming services get canceled after one season (and a cliffhanger) most of the time.  The most recent shows I wrote about on this blog, Class of ’09 and Daisy Jones and The Six, are streaming shows that fit this bill for me, but they were both one-and-done limited series.  Not to mention that ’09 was pretty disappointing in the end.

Warrior Nun was really fun and got canceled after S2, and now (it seems?) resurrected after a giant fan campaign.  Shadow & Bone finished a thoroughly entertaining S2 a couple months ago and we’ve heard jack shit from Netflix since then, so I assume that’s canceled too.  Sometimes I end up watching shows like Cursed knowing full well I’ll never see a season 2 (after a giant cliffhanger).  It’s fucking exhausting.  In the old days you could get 100+ eps out of shows like this, but now, its’ nearly impossible to even get to 20.

This is why I started to dig into the archives of dearly departed shows, after Netflix consistently put Wynonna on my “recommended for you” list for quite a while.  The algorithm knows me better than I know myself.  But then, per usual, by the time I finally decided I would try it out, it disappeared from all my menus and I had to go dig it up using the search function.  Great job, algorithm.

To be honest I think subconsciously one of the reasons I had never checked Wynonna Earp out is, well you may notice that the majority of TV reviews on this blog are for The 100.  It’s the only show I’ve ever consistently reviewed on this site, and thus it’s the only repeat readership I ever had.  When Wynonna came out, it was right around the time that The 100 killed Lexa and major segments of the internet blew up because of its usage of the harmful and cliche “bury your gays” trope.  Wynonna‘s big claim to fame at the time (from what I saw) was that they were specifically going to do the polar opposite of The 100 and respect their LGBTQ characters, allow them to have prominent long term storylines and relationships, etc.

After a while, I noticed that this started to cause some bitterness in some factions of The 100 fandom.  TV reviewer Mo Ryan, who had been pumping up The 100 prior to this point, started pumping up Wynonna instead, almost in the sense of it being the antidote to The 100.  Emily Andras, Wynonna‘s showrunner, was not shy about her intentions to avoid the mistakes of The 100, and I noticed that some of the Hundy fans began grumbling about Andras pretty regularly, accusing her of being somewhat smug and holier than thou.  I used to kinda chuckle about it, but I knew nothing about Andras or Wynonna, so I couldn’t put too much into it either way.

What The 100 fans eventually did find out, though, was that their show’s showrunner, Jason Rothenberg, was an megalomaniac who was far more interested in getting revenge on his own fanbase than in making a good TV show.  I still know nothing about Emily Andras, but I hope she’s nothing like Jason Rothenberg.  <shudder>  And while I know nothing of her or her personality or motivations, now that I’ve watched Wynonna Earp I can at least say that Andras did legitimately do many things right that Rothenberg did wrong.

First and foremost, Wynonna is a show that goes out of its way to provide something for everyone: gays, bi’s, straights, youngs, olds (kind of), demons, vampires, angels, witches, cops, drunks, sluts, manwhores, pansexual cupids, undead wild west historical figures … you name the type of person and the show probably has something for them.  The 100 on its surface seemed to be going for something like this, but it turned out to be a thin facade.  After a few seasons it became clear what was actually happening: Rothenberg wasn’t bringing folks of different interests together at all, he was pitting them against each other for his own gain.

For a while he was able to successfully present each new storyline as an exercise in progressiveness and inclusivity, while on the DL he was actually using each storyline to distract and detract from another.  His goals were nothing more than trying to make his own mark on the series, go in a different direction than the books, and lord only knows what else.  When the fans would react poorly to his shenanigans, it would piss him off, and he’d double down on whatever idiocy he was going for at the time.  It was a snowball effect and a self-fulfilling prophecy.  Watching a show after-the-fact removes all this real-time behind-the-scenes drama from the experience, which makes for a far less stressful watching experience, but I don’t see evidence from Wynonna‘s storylines that point to this type of deviousness from its showrunner.

Dolls’s Character Arc is a Little Weird Tho

That said, I do wonder what happened with the Dolls character.  This is the one strange thing I can point to where I remember seeing some angry tweets when he was killed off.  However I can’t remember at this point if they were from bitter The 100 fans trying to talk shit about Andras, or if they were from regular Wynonna fans, or both.  I wouldn’t be surprised if they came from both.  Was it always the plan to kill him off in order to help resolve the Dolls / Wynonna / Doc love triangle?  Did the actor book another gig?  Was there drama behind the scenes?  Was it one of those situations where the character was originally meant to only be in a few eps but they ended up keeping him far longer because he was good?

I feel bad for Dolls, because to some extent it feels like his chances with Wynonna were dashed the second the the lead actress (Melanie Scrofano) got pregnant.  Given that Wynonna and Doc had shtupped in S1, of course the baby had to be Doc’s.  They were never really gonna make it a Revenant baby.  Dolls got cock-blocked with a rattle the second his big moment arrived.  And then his death at the start of S3 seemed so random and sudden, it made me wonder if something else was going on there.  That said, I don’t really know how else they were gonna resolve that love triangle.  The history of it all seems like it would have to point to Doc as endgame, but I thought Dolls would have been a great love interest too, at least for a while.

Update: I saw a Looper video on YouTube that said the actor Shamier Anderson had pre-planned his own exit and death storyline so that he could take up some other acting opportunities.  Glad to know it was planned and there was no drama behind it.

Gimme Moar

In the end maybe it worked out for the better, because had Dolls been a full-fledged love interest, it seems like the show would have needed more seasons to let it play out.  Because goddamn I love Doc too and there would’ve been way too much story to tell with both of those love stories.  It sucks because given the TV hellscape we’re in in 2023, where the streaming model we hoped would fix everything has actually made many things way worse, I should just be thrilled that 49 episodes of Wynonna Earp were able to be made.  But reading up on the show I found out also of all the uphill battles it faced to even get that far, with the production company running out of money, and SyFy originally ordering a S5 but then rescinding the offer (did I read that right?  I swear I read that somewhere).  Suddenly I feel cheated out of something I never knew could have existed in the first place.

I just want more is all.  Mmmoooorrrrrre.  I’m greedy, but I also think this show could go on for another season or two and still provide all kinds of entertainment.  The vast monster world provides endless possibilities for storylines.  Maybe Robin can come back with his original face!  (I assume the actor must’ve had scheduling conflicts with S4 filming.)  Or we can see where things go with Jeremy’s new love interest, the catering guy!  What happened with Rachel and Billy’s fishing trip?  How are things going with Nedley and Bunny?  What trouble is Mercedes getting up to now that she’s a vampire?  It’s anyone’s guess.  Call me, producers, I’ve got plenty of ideas.

Humble Beginnings

One thing I kinda miss about the old TV model is the ability to watch a “meh” show find its footing, get the cast / writers / directors / crew gelling well together, figure out what works and what doesn’t, and built itself into a great show.  Back in the days when you’d get several seasons of 22+ or even 16 eps each, there was time to do this.  Wynonna didn’t have quite that luxury with 12-13 ep seasons, and I have to admit, the series starts off as a chaotic mess with terrible special effects.  Plus, it has a batshit premise – Wyatt Earp’s firstborn descendants are cursed to fight the outlaws he killed as they rise from hell as demons over and over and over again when the latest heir turns 27, for eternity.  An undead Doc Holliday is a main character in the show.  I described this to my husband and he did a spit take.

The combination of these things was enough to make me slightly question why I had made the choice to try watching the show at first, but luckily Wynonna finds its footing pretty quickly.  I believe it’s around the 4th episode that it starts to hit a decent stride and things start to solidify.  Plus, it’s somewhat minor, but one thing that helps the show get past its somewhat janky feeling in season 1 is that eventually they simply stop trying to do special effects when Wynonna kills the revenants.  Killing a revenant sends them back to hell in a pit of flames, and eventually, they stop showing this when the revenants die.  This show was never gonna get an MCU budget, and in situations like this, it always works better to just simplify and focus more on other cool stuff like fight scenes and anything practical and cheaper.

And in terms of the wacky premise, who am I kidding, I am down for literally any ridiculous premise you give me, as long as it involves my favorite formula – great lady protagonist(s) doing interesting things, charming love interests, and (icing on the cake) ass-kicking.  Particularly if the show is a dramedy that doesn’t take itself seriously, you really can get away with almost anything if you make me laugh while also tugging at my heartstrings.

And Wynonna really is funny as hell.  It’s a show that makes me yelp / laugh out loud at least once or twice per ep, usually more.  Some of the lines are kinda too much in the sense that they probably look funny on paper but sound goofy coming out of character’s mouths, but the comedy hits more often than it misses.  I might do another blog post to cover some of my favorite funny moments and eps just so this one doesn’t wind up being too long.  And as much credit for that goes to the actors as the writers, maybe more.  I imagine that it’s not an easy thing to make something on paper pop on screen and hit the audience the way the writer was hoping it would.

Part of what makes Wynonna work as a protagonist is how goofy and somewhat clumsy she is, which makes her relatable to many of us.  Melanie Scrofano has a good sarcastic wit and a talent for physical comedy.  Out of all the actors on this show, I had seen literally none of them in anything ever (that I can remember), other than Scrofano as one of the evil sisters in Ready or Not (which I only remembered when I was looking at IMDb, but I do recall her eating that role up quite well).

The rest of the cast really are great and funny too, with Tim Rozon as Doc also being particularly good with physical comedy.  Even with Dolls being such an overly serious character, Shamier Anderson lets loose at just the right moments, particular in his rivalry scenes with Doc.  Nicole Haught’s love/hate relationship with Wynonna is also a good source of comedy, and despite Waverly’s character being kind of overly sincere, she’s got some really funny scenes too.  I’ll get into some particulars in another post, because some of the guest actors, even the ones who only show up in one episode, are truly amazing as well.  There are a couple guest actors in S4 who really knock it out of the park.

Incorporating a Pregnancy Without Ruining the Show

Historically, TV shows have not been great at dealing with the pregnancy of a lead actress, especially if the show involves physical stunts and fighting.  In action shows it seems to happen quite rarely, at least from what I’ve seen, probably because actors and creators are terrified to have to deal with it.

I’m picturing the now-infamous story about Joss Whedon bullying Charisma Carpenter and allegedly firing her from Angel in retaliation for a pregnancy while filming.  On the much less severe end of the spectrum, I’m also picturing the way Sydney was practically replaced with some dumb new protégé on Alias when Jennifer Garner got pregnant with her first Affleck spawn.  I recall Sydney having to take somewhat of a background role as the new chick’s handler or something.  It should be noted that JenGar’s pregnancy was the least of Alias‘s problems by that point, it was merely one more nail in a coffin that was already mostly built, with the show lying nearly dead inside.  Still though, it was definitely a big nail, and part of the reason my memory of it is so vague is that I think it was the straw that finally broke the camel’s back for me, and I stopped watching.

The best incorporation of a pregnancy I can think of up until this point is Kaitlin Olson as Dee on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.  Frankly, it’s probably the only one I’ve ever enjoyed prior to Wynonna.  Always Sunny is kind of the perfect show to deal with something like this, because the characters are so depraved that you can do nearly anything with them.  In Sunny, Dee decides to become a surrogate to make money, which works perfectly because she can just give up the baby once she pops it out and just move right on.  Sunny is also a pure comedy, so no fight scenes are involved, but Dee is known for her physical comedy, so some of this does still apply.

When I first realized that S2 was gonna be pregnant Wynonna, my heart sank, because other than Sunny, I’ve just never seen this done well.  I’ve never seen a situation in an action show where the pregnancy doesn’t slow down the storylines and/or totally sideline the character.  Which is why I was glad to be proven entirely wrong in this case – Wynonna somehow manages to incorporate this into the story without slowing down any of the stories or the protagonist at all.  In a sense, it actually adds to the story when we get to see how Doc and Wynonna (and everyone else) deal with it all, which is pretty heartwarming – and funny! – at various points.

Example 1, heartwarming: “I’m all in.”  Awwwwww <melts into a puddle>

Example 2, funny: Wynonna and Haught at the revenant bar trying to track down possible baby daddy #2.

Now, the one thing that is far more awkward with Wynonna than Sunny is that Wynonna isn’t just a surrogate, this is actually her baby.  So I struggled all of S2 with trying to predict what the hell was gonna happen to this kid once it popped out into the world.  If there’s anything a hundred times harder than dealing with a pregnancy, it’s dealing with a flippin’ newborn baby.  How the hell would Wynonna and team continue to fight monsters with a tiny little baby at home??  Would they just get a great babysitter?  I looked ahead at the quick episode descriptions for seasons 3 and 4, and the baby was nowhere to be found.  So what the hell was gonna happen?  The baby can’t just disappear, and Wynonna can’t just give it up without seeming irresponsible.

But wait!  To be fair, babies get adopted out all the time IRL, and we don’t generally shit on the biological mothers for it.  It usually happens for a good reason.  So would Wynonna have a good reason??  Well, it turns out, the writers do concoct a pretty compelling reason for the baby to have to be whisked out of Purgatory immediately, at least at first.  You see, the next Earp heir is a hot commodity with the revenants and other monsters.  They’ll never stop until they kidnap her to sell her to the highest bidder.  And the revenants can’t leave Purgatory, so the answer is simple – get the kid out of Purgatory.  It’s an excuse that works well enough in the short term, but feels a little awkward as time goes on.  That said, I’m perfectly willing to forgive it, knowing that the baby storyline only existed due to outside forces to begin with, and we didn’t tune into Wynonna’s Nursery Hour, we tuned into Wynonna Earp Kicks Demon Ass and Takes Names.  For that, I’ll happily overlook it.

But again, big props to the show for pulling this off without messing anything up, without making the magical disappearing baby tooo awkward, and using it to actually enhance the show somewhat.

Canuck Overload

I’ve watched a lot of pretty Canadian shows, though most of them have been US-produced and just filmed in Canada.  However, that generally translates to a lot of Canadian actors in at least supporting roles.  The 100 in Vancouver, Covert Affairs in Toronto, even Castle felt pretty Canadian despite being filmed in L.A. because of the two leads and their accents.  But Wynonna Earp reaches levels of Canuck I’ve never seen before, it feels almost obnoxiously Canadian, and I think a huge reason for that is that the damn story is so American, and the setting doesn’t add up.  It really took me an extremely stupid amount of time to realize that this show  – about flippin’ Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday – is set in Canada.  How??

The only reason I realized it is because at some point, I started noticing the amount of snow that was just in every single scene.  Clearly they were forced to film in the winter months a lot of the time, which just feels cruel.  Eventually I finally said, “Hey … this really doesn’t feel like Tombstone.”  Can’t get anything past me!  I mean, not to mention the scene in S3 where they’re celebrating Christmas, and they’re all wearing those paper crown things like they do in England.  I was like WTF, lol there is definitely some cognitive dissonance there given the American wild west basis of the story.

Many of the actors either don’t have strong accents or they hide them well, but a couple, like Jeremy, are exceedingly Canadian.  Oddly, Waverly’s accent is the most Canadian of them all, which is why I was surprised to hear the actress Dominique Provost-Chalkley’s real accent sounds British … ohhh k I’m looking at her IMDb now and it describes her as “British-French Canadian”.  Maybe the actress grew up in England, but I have rarely heard an accent as Canadian as Waverly’s.

Melanie Scrofano is pretty good at hiding her inner maple leaf, but I noticed a slip in the penultimate ep of the series when she yells the word “out.”  “Oot!”  Ahh, there it is.  Tim Rozon never breaks his “wild west guy” accent for the entire series, but then I watched some interview clips with him and was like, damn.  Him too.  I’m just joking and being an asshole of course, but I read the Wikipedia pages for both Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp, and they traveled around to and lived in a ton of places, but the furthest north I can find for either of them is like South Dakota.  I don’t see Canada anywhere.  Why the hell would the Earp homestead be all the way up there?  Hey, I may have just missed something, or the Wikis might not cover every detail.

But in the meantime I saw something else they took creative license on: The real Doc Holliday was not exactly a looker.  I don’t think I’d leave my family behind in Purgatory for this dude.

Anyway, Hot Holliday is a welcome change and the Canada setting is trivial in the grand scheme of things, but it’s just such a bizarre aspect of the show’s premise that it seemed worth mentioning.

This show is 4 seasons and 49 eps, and I’d like to talk a bit about the ships, the funny stuff, and some of my fave moments, but I don’t want this post to be 500 miles long.  So I’ll do another post to cover these topics, and for now I’ll just say, Wynonna Earp definitely scratched that itch for me.  It hit me in the feels, had me irrationally worried about characters and plotlines even when I wasn’t watching the show, gave me withdrawals once it ended, made me want way more, and got me obsessed enough to write a couple blog posts about it.

If you’re into wacky/fun shows like this with great characters and you haven’t seen Wynonna Earp yet, check it out.  It’s on Netflix, at least as of this writing.  I’ll plan to come back and talk more about the other topics in another blog post.