100 Favorite Shows: #16 — Wilfred (U.S.)
“A real prick. Nobody liked him. Very preachy, always telling other people how to live their lives.”
[Disclaimer: Allison Mack portrayed Amanda on Wilfred. She is currently anticipating a sentence after she pled guilty to racketeering in 2019. She was also charged with sex trafficking and forced labor in 2018, after being arrested in connection to her NXIVM cult role. The New York Times reported on the story in full.]
In 2007, Jason Gann and Adam Zwar teamed for a stoner comedy about a man who saw his neighbor’s dog, Wilfred, as an Australian man in a gray dog costume (Gann). The series lasted two seasons on Australia’s SBS One station, with one airing in 2007 and the second in 2010. A year after that, Gann and Zwar’s Wilfred had been picked up for an American remake on FX, where it aired for three seasons before shifting the final arc to FXX. Developing Wilfred for U.S. audiences was David Zuckerman, who enhanced Gann and Zwar’s initial vision from all comedy hijinks to part comedy, part psychological mystery as to the origin of Wilfred’s identity. With Elijah Wood tapping in for the lead role of Ryan Newman, the series began with his attempted suicide before his neighbor, Jenna (Fiona Gubelmann), greeted him with Wilfred in tow. And so began one of the century’s strangest, most remarkable shows.
(This essay contains in-depth spoilers for Wilfred. Trust me, this is a show that can be spoiled.)
Each episode of Wilfred begins with twinkling, lullaby-oriented theme music and a profound quote from a famous thinker or artist or notable figure (from Mark Twain to Emily Dickinson to Hippocrates) that relates to the major theme of each episode, entitled as such. (“Uncertainty,” “Sincerity,” “Patterns,” for example.) These quotes are meaningful and thought-provoking and, by the end of the episode, they become remarkably reflective. On the surface, these attributes might seem to be in direct contrast from Wilfred, which is frequently profane and obscene, but they’re each woven into the narrative. After all, the only thing Ryan and Wilfred did more than light up bongs in the basement was seek to instill these various qualities within Ryan. Yet, Wilfred’s greatest lesson was that these qualities were always within Ryan; he just needed a little bit of help to bring them out and fulfill the quotes that dictated the actions of each episode.
“The value of identity is that so often with it comes purpose,” reads the quote from Richard R. Grant at the outset of the first season finale, “Identity.” This foretells the tension of the installment between Ryan’s innate desire to be a good, helpful person and his inner selfishness that could be wielded to obtain his basest desires. The conflict between Ryan’s morality and his id is a recurring motif throughout Wilfred and it’s always propped up by an underrated (in the scale of all television) performance from Elijah Wood.
Most famous for portraying Frodo Baggins, the main character of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Elijah Wood has taken the same route of many insanely famous genre actors from the 2000s. Think of Tobey Maguire hanging up the webs after his Spider-Man trilogy or Daniel Radcliffe snapping the Elder wand in the final Harry Potter film. Since those iconic roles came to an end, Wood, Maguire, and Radcliffe have each been extremely choosy with their roles. While Maguire has become essentially a recluse, Radcliffe and Wood have chosen particularly wacky roles in their career. For Radcliffe, there were movies like Swiss Army Man and the interactive Netflix continuation of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. For Wood, there have been a number of indie films, as well as an FX series featuring a depressed man and his talking Australian dog.
Wood is no stranger to playing the straight man of a fantastical series and, throughout Wilfred, he’s dialing up his ability to be simultaneously game for the shenanigans, as well as wary of his own mental wellness. From his buttoned-to-the-neck dress shirts tucked into corduroy pants to the fact that every scene with another actor requires Wood to be withholding information from them, it’s a delicate balancing act for the former Hobbit — just like Ryan’s life has become ever since Wilfred waltzed into it sheepishly.
While Wood is exceptional in all forty-nine episodes of the series, that’s not to say the other actors aren’t also putting in incredible work on the series. Dorian Brown toes the line as Ryan’s sister, Kristen, delicately pacing out her occasionally overbearing hostility, so as not to alienate the viewers. Chris Klein turns in an unexpectedly wholesome (and occasionally tumultuous) performance as Jenna’s boyfriend. Gubelmann herself is easy to overlook, but every scene with Gann’s Wilfred requires her to be blithe, sweet, and oblivious and never once does Gubelmann hit an insincere note. And, of course, there’s Gann himself, who commits himself so fully to the Wilfred character that he’s as inseparable from it as Ricky Gervais is from David Brent or Phoebe Waller-Bridge from Fleabag.
The character of Wilfred is equal-parts oafish dog and grotesque human man. He loves attention and seizes any opportunity to play up the cutesy nature others perceive in him (he calls his lies “Wilfred-lies” and builds anticipation for the reveal of himself wearing a bow tie), but he also laments that the shit in the yard tastes too much like grass and frequently humps his best stuffed animal friend, Bear (seen as alive to Wilfred in the form of Lauren Powers). However, he also acts nothing like a dog when giving his opinion on abortions and The Wire, or when he equates his ban from eating cheese to his ban from “jacking morphine.” It’s a remarkable construction on the part of Gann — Wilfred, the character, belongs in television’s pantheon — that always feel authentically like a degenerate dog come to life.
Wilfred also operates in the series as more than just a dog who likes to have sex and do drugs. He’s also a veritable spirit guide and morality manifestation for Ryan. Yes, Ryan likes to pretend that he’s guiding Wilfred in tandem (“Well, compassion was the first trick I taught him,” Ryan lies to Nurse Lisa (Rashida Jones) in “Respect”), but as Wilfred reaffirms at the end of almost every installment, Ryan is strictly the learner in their interactions.
After all, Wilfred possesses immense, “wondrous power,” while Ryan spends his free time talking to a dog and making thirty-foot paperclip chains. As a dog, Wilfred pretty much has his life figured out, so he devotes his spare time to coaching Ryan, guiding him closer and closer to innate happiness with each quote-based lesson along the way. Sometimes, these lessons are extremely challenging and slide a little bit too close to murder, but they’re always in the name of bringing Ryan closer to accepting himself as he is. Each episode comes with the sensation that Wilfred knows Ryan’s intentions behind every action. Sometimes, it’s best for him to just let Ryan indulge in his instincts (what does a dog know better than instincts?), but other times, Wilfred does go to great lengths in an attempt to prevent Ryan from acting on his impulses.
The aforementioned episode, “Identity,” is an excellent example of the latter tendency within Wilfred. Most of the time, Wilfred’s desperation to prevent Ryan from destroying his own life inadvertently is evident within Gann’s occasional sincerity. Most of the time, his advice and lessons come with a veneer of sardonic detachment. But in “Identity,” Wilfred gets straight to the point and sheds ambiguity for the sake of convincing Ryan not to indulge in the “slippery slope” of manipulation.
Granted, it’s Wilfred who pushes him down the path of “just this once,” when he uses Ryan’s ruthlessness to save Jenna’s job as a broadcaster, but he also pulls up on the reins immediately when Ryan takes it too far. Acting on decisions he knows are toxic and manipulative, Ryan becomes overly cocky when he hosts a dinner party to celebrate Jenna’s exoneration. The intent behind the party is a clear usage of his family, friends, and neighbors to split up Jenna and Drew so he can swoop in and date Jenna himself, but we’re powerless to watch his entire life unravel from his own doing. (So is Wilfred, who is distracted from the party by counting and popping bubbles.)
Eventually, Wilfred is proven right as Ryan indulges the manipulative side of his personality, rather than the side that is marked by genuine kindness and helping qualities. He blackmails his sister with the affair she’s having, he appeals to Jenna’s subconscious to break off her potential engagement, and ultimately, he inadvertently causes Wilfred to get hit by a car. One bad decision always leads to another and on Wilfred, shit can get real extremely quickly. It’s not just a slippery slope; it’s an outright ninety degree angle.
By the end of this season finale, everything in Ryan’s life is completely ruined and he suffers a break in sanity after Wilfred, at the vet’s office, doesn’t even recognize him. Before the accident, Wilfred warned Ryan, “You’re not me” after Ryan evoked all the horrible decision-making the dog has engaged in over the years. Wilfred knows exactly how horrendous the manipulation within him, as a dog, makes his personality, but he also sees Ryan as having the capacity to be above such mental abuse. Because Ryan and Wilfred are two sides of the same persona (quite literally, as we realize by the series’ end), they need each other to check one another. After all, a slippery slope is only slippery when there’s no one there to slide alongside you.
The ultimate character arc for Ryan Newman is to come to terms with his identity. If Wilfred is a manifestation solely of Ryan’s mind, then he knows he has the capacity to be a good person, if only he can learn to quell his inherited proclivity for insanity. (Medication goes a long way, as Ryan’s mother (Mary Steenburgen and Mimi Rogers) advocates in the series finale, “Happiness.”) It’s not just about finding his way in a world that spit him out when he pursued the traditional routes of careers and relationships. It’s about finding a purpose that fulfills his purest desires, props up his prevailing sense of goodness, and reckons with his status as a member of the Newman family that often isolated him.
Even if Wilfred is an unmitigated asshole who makes Ryan’s life a “living hell” until he gets what he wants from him, he’s still a crucial figure for helping Ryan along on the universal quest for happiness. (In this sense, Wilfred does become a parable figure for religion. Many seek faith to guide them to happiness, while Ryan finds that same goal in a talking dog, who does admittedly have a God complex, especially in “Respect,” which deliberately paints Wilfred as a Christ figure who can summon thunder with a “lucky coincidence.”) In this world, it’s reassuring to think that animals are the ones who choose us (Wilfred does enter into Ryan’s life, rather than vice versa), but the happiness we seek is always within us; Wilfred doesn’t tell Ryan anything he isn’t already aware of.
This does call into question what exactly is Wilfred. At first, the comedic premise of the series encouraged viewers to just go along with it, but over time, Ryan’s need for answers was inescapable and the show relented and worked towards providing a resolution to the mystery of the talking Australian shepherd.
At the time of Wilfred’s pivot into full mystery over a dark comedy (murders matter a lot more in the later seasons than Wilfred’s alleged misconduct in “Respect” because the premise of a raunchy dog can understandably get old quick), I discovered Reddit for the first time. I missed out on Internet theorizing for series like Lost, but I got to participate fully with a forum of thirty devoted Wilfred fans, all throwing out theories, clues, and evidence based on Easter eggs from the series’ creative teams.
Oh boy, there sure were a ton of theories. One of the more popular ones was that Ryan’s attempted suicide in the series premiere, also entitled “Happiness,” had actually worked and he’d been deposited into a Wilfred-guided purgatory to prove himself worthy of a blissful afterlife. Another was that Ryan was existing in a Truman Show situation where everyone was an actor who was getting their jollies off on manipulating him into egregious criminal activity.
In the actual canon of the show, Wilfred had a ton of fun playing with the Internet theorizing that grew in popularity as the show dwindled in all but its most devoted viewers. In “Identity,” Wilfred mocks Ryan’s paranoia by alluding to him that his test for escaping purgatory is to get Jenna her job back by any means necessary. It’s a brief aside in a largely comedic and moral episode.
By season four, though, these misguided theories from online fans could serve as the premise for an entire episode, namely “Answers.” This installment sees Ryan and Wilfred participating in a shock study that quickly devolves into a test to uncover one’s “worst fears,” depicting Ryan as the subject of the experiment, rather than Wilfred. From there, a Stay-type mind-flip unfolds as Wilfred opens doorknobs with his “paws,” receives messages from directors in his earpieces, and takes of the dog costume in a dressing room that is filled with numerous gray outfits and floppy ears. The psychological trippiness of the episode reaches a crescendo when Kristen attempts to kickbox Ryan and the visual framing narrows and bounces like a Heffalumps and Woozles sequence.
At first, it seems like Wilfred is building to a revelation that Ryan’s entire life has been one manipulative lie for the sake of twisted entertainment on the part of those who pretend to be his friend, his sister, his dog. But soon, the installment becomes almost too meta (a timeline depicting the events of the Wilfred series, a web of photographs implying that recasting from Steenburgen to Rogers, Bruce’s Dwight Yoakam to Billy Baldwin, and Wood taking over Zwar’s Australian Adam was intentional) and we’re aware that this can’t possibly be the answer to Wilfred’s identity. It’s just a fun bit of exploration down the path of a theory that is truly insane, a theory that Ryan deeply fears could be real. (He buys into it very quickly, dragging Kristen’s body without a second thought of their faux sibling relationship.)
The fact that Wilfred could pull off an episode like this, though, was deeply thrilling. Even if it wasn’t one hundred percent consequential for the ultimate solution to Wilfred’s identity, it was still a wild character study that helped us understand the state of Ryan’s mentality as he approaches the finale-infused answers he seeks. It’s still the episode I evoke the most when many television fans and critics lament that not one series ever succeeded at becoming the “new Lost.” I think series like The Event and FlashForward tried and failed to become the “new Lost,” but Wilfred quietly pulled it off all along, with brand new depictions of mysteries and characters we genuinely cared for.
Sometimes, Wilfred would draw direct parallels to Lost (when Wilfred evokes “the island” and warns of a nearby smoke monster, it’s similarly meta to when Robin Williams appears as Dr. Eddy and slips in a brief, “shazbot”), but many of the mysteries presented on Wilfred were on par with those presented on Lost. From the seesawing debate over whether or not Ryan’s basement actually exists to the Ben Linus-esque character treatment of Bruce, who never explained why exactly he knew of Wilfred’s existence, the mysteries were way more engaging than I ever expected when I first saw an ad for Wilfred at the top of the YouTube page for “Where the Hell Is Matt?” I still get the same feeling from the revelation that Kristen’s childhood drawing depicted Wilfred that I do from the giant foot statue on the island of Lost. Some mysteries are just eternal.
In an episode directly correlated to “Answers,” season two’s “Questions” depicts Ryan on an ayahuasca trip to uncover the reason why he suffers a panic attack whenever Kristen’s baby cries. Directed by Randall Einhorn (as most Wilfred episodes were), the drug trip through Ryan’s mind is filmed in an interesting style, vacillating between fishbowl camerawork and the right-sided framing of characters projected against western backdrops, but it’s always just a little detached from reality. (And bringing Einhorn in to set the visual language of the show implies a need to ground as much of Wilfred’s fantastical elements in at least some form of realism.) However, it’s just tied to Ryan’s normal persona enough to shift his crucial question of the trip from “Why am I having panic attacks?” to “What is the truth behind Wilfred?”
The questions aren’t as existential as one would expect from a highly-anticipated ayahuasca trip on Wilfred, but they’re among the most important for Ryan to better understand himself and his future (a crying baby triggering panic attacks might spell doom for future prospects of a family of his own, for example). Ultimately, though, when Ryan enters into a trip within a trip, he meets a man named P.T. (Brad Dourif), who develops photos of Ryan’s youth within his own memory. The reveal centers Ryan back into his initial quest for panic attack explanations (Wilfred had previously hijacked his trip to be his true spirit guide, feeling that Ryan must learn the truth about himself to be prepared for learning the truth about Wilfred), uncovering that it’s not the crying that triggers him; it’s Kristen telling Ryan to be quiet while crying, like when they were kids, so he wouldn’t upset their parents.
For the majority of “Questions,” Ryan’s trip is depicted as exactly the kind one would expect from a guy who spends most of his time getting high on a couch in his basement (his spirit guide, Red Wolf (Gil Birmingham), addresses his stereotypical manifestation as being derived from a movie, similar to how the “Answers” experiment is derived from an idea in a Batman movie), but it never sincerely posits Ryan’s spirit quest as a metaphysical journey to uncover life’s greatest mysteries. Instead, “Questions” succeeds so fully by intentionally marking the episode with irony that mocks its own illusions of a grander mystery grandeur. At the core of Wilfred, Ryan is just another guy in California, not the “chosen one” and Wilfred wisely never leans into verifiable mythology for the sake of treating the series with that necessary reality.
After all, the lessons Ryan arrives to from his trip lie within his own mind. He knows he must stop acting on disturbed relationships with loved ones (he hardly seems to truly “love” Jenna, at that) and out of spite whenever he feels that Wilfred is being disingenuous with him (it’s easy to get annoyed with Ryan’s paranoia), but he also knows that the best way to ease his volatile reactions to the people in his life is to allow himself to feel every emotion in his mind, rather than increase the extent to which he flees from them.
Ryan doesn’t learn the truth behind Wilfred’s identity in “Questions,” but he does learn that his panic attacks come from a time in his childhood when he had to learn to repress his emotions so as to appease others. At the end of the episode, Ryan is awash with the understanding that his break-up is allowed to make him cry. As the tears fall from his face, Wilfred cuddles close to Ryan (supplanting Gann’s immaculate yelling and physical panic in the beginning of the episode when he feels Ryan’s attack along with him) and allows Ryan to just be sad. For the first time, Wilfred doesn’t feel the need to make Ryan’s anguish dissipate because Ryan doesn’t feel the need either. He’s content to stay in the moment with Wilfred and work through his own melancholy. That kind of loyalty goes beyond one character’s innate canine connection. In that moment, they’re just friends comforting one another.
That’s all Wilfred ever needed to be for Ryan: a friend. It was enough for Ryan to have someone to spend his days with and grow closer to becoming the truest version of himself, learning what would genuinely make him happy, rather than just what he perceived would do so.
Fortunately, Wilfred did bring a sense of closure to the actual mystery they presented. After seasons of investigative work, it’s eventually revealed that Wilfred was merely a psychological manifestation of Ryan’s own mental break onto a dog he babysat on the daily. Wilfred took the form of Richard, a man from The Flock of the Gray Shepherd, a cult his parents belonged to and which his stepfather, Henry (James Remar), emancipated them from. In this cult, led by Ryan’s father, Charles (Tobin Bell), they believed that a dog god of pure heart, Mataman (similar to Matt Damon’s name), would lead a “chosen one” to happiness. (There was also an indistinguishable trickster dog god named Krungel.) This cult consisted of Richard, Shane (the original Bruce), and Theo (the original P.T.) and Ryan’s suppressed memories of these men and their ideologies came out in the formation of Wilfred as an imaginary friend who arrived at his moment of highest need and departed when Ryan had learned all that he needed to about himself (still culminating in an impossible-to-rewatch death scene for the dog version of Wilfred).
Charles crucially confesses to Ryan that the cult was completely fabricated, but that his own mental break made him believe everything he said. He presents a way forward for Ryan’s own grasp on reality by illuminating how we all grapple with mental illness. Some are just more extreme than others, but that doesn’t mean they’re beyond help. We can all help one another, as Henry does for Charles, in spite of perceived animosity that could have existed between them.
In the end, that’s all Wilfred technically was. Not some master external mystery depicting the worst-case scenario of Ryan’s relationship with his neighbor’s dog and not some sort of Fight Club-type devil on the shoulder. He was just a projection of Ryan’s suppressed childhood memories, which ranged from being told not to cry to being a part of a cult with a menagerie of complicate figures. It’s not the most mind-blowing solution to the problem, but it’s still one that holds up satisfyingly against all other Wilfred installments. In that way, no other television series quite expanded my scope of the possibilities of storytelling like Wilfred did.
When Ryan is left alone in the finale (partially by choice when he strives to will the vision of Wilfred out of his mind and partially by the genuine death of Jenna’s dog), he believes he’s taking the necessary steps to becoming “sane,” whatever that means in a world like ours.
Instead, Ryan realizes that happiness can still exist in a life that is anchored by a coping mechanism of his subconscious. If some people find solace and happiness in a church and some people find it in a sports stadium, then what’s so wrong with finding it in an Australian man sporting a dog costume? Like spraying scalding hot water onto itchy skin, it’s a form of release for interior anguish that helps those affected in spurts. Relaxing on the beach (with the basement’s couch, no less) in the final moments of the series, Wilfred unpacks the deepest memories of Ryan’s mind before gesturing towards a bright yellow object that washed up on shore. It’s a tennis ball, the same one that bounced freely from Ryan’s basement-closet at the end of season one. Whenever he picks up the ball, he connects himself back to Wilfred, dog or not. Because why not just vibe? Now that Ryan’s gained control over his imaginary friend, there’s no harm to spending time with him to feel a little more at home in an unforgiving, unhappy world. Calvin seemed happier and healthier around Hobbes.
When a dog chases a tennis ball, they exhibit true, moment-to-moment freedom that we humans will never be able to mirror. The best we can do is reach down, pick up the tennis ball, and throw it again. Living vicariously through our friends. Our animal friends. The ones who came all the way from down under to lead us to happiness.
