FX has picked up Wilfred for a third season, and Deadline reports the show will have two new bosses in the writers' room when it comes back. David Zuckerman, who adapted Wilfred from the Australian original and served as showrunner for Seasons 1 and 2, is choosing to step down, and he's being replaced by two staff Wilfred writers/producers, Reed Agnew and Eli Jorné. This is FX's first sitcom pick-up since renewing Louie in August, and hopefully Wilfred will make it back for its new season before Louie does in 2014, which still sounds like a really long way away.
Wilfred's second season is set to premiere on June 28 on FX but you can watch the first episode on the Internet right now. (Hell, you might already be watching it.) Robin Williams makes an appearance as a psychiatrist, because it's his favorite profession to act as other than a jumanji. (He played a jumanji in Jumanji, right?) The first couple minutes focuses on whether Wilfred does or does not appear as a human in a dog costume. It's a real Wilfred-they-won't-they story.
When I spoke to Jason Gann ahead of last week's trippy first season finale of Wilfred, I wanted to know about how the folks back home regarded the prospect of remaking the cult hit for American audiences. I started with Gann's co-creator and Aussie co-star, Adam Zwar, who gave up control of the show so Gann could make the adaptation.
Sure, there might be plenty of bong hits and tennis-ball-fetching, but creator and star of Wilfred Jason Gann wants to make clear that the black humor of his new FX show isn't going to be scarified for a few leg humping jokes. "It’s a dark comedy that I call traumedy," Gann explains. "There’s the human trauma, and then the trauma that Wilfred goes through. We really hit some dark human emotions." So, of course, when producers tried to entice Gann into make an American Wilfred after having a 16-episode run in Australia, they naturally compared it to the most prominent traumedy of our time. "And then, they [...]
As far as casting goes, Elijah Wood seems like just the kind of guy to hallucinate a misanthropist talking dog. With his giant, frightened Precious Moments eyes and dapper type-A neatness, Wood's protagonist Ryan already seems to be at the brink of sanity when the pilot begins: here is Ryan typing up the fourth draft of his suicide note, here is Ryan blending his anti-anxiety meeds into a smoothie, here he is jumping rope in an effort to kill time before he dies. Here is Ryan meeting his psychological problems disguised in a dog costume.
