Over the Garden Wall: Ten Episodes, Five Nights, One Complete Thing

Over the Garden Wall is not a season of television. It is ten episodes and one week.

Trailer, via Crunchyroll Store Australia.

Ten Episodes Over Five Nights

Cartoon Network broadcast Over the Garden Wall across the week of November 3 to November 7, 2014. Ten episodes. Five nights. It was the first miniseries on the network, and the format is the whole point. There is no second season to dilute it, no filler episode to pad it out, no back half where the show loses the thread. Patrick McHale built something with a fixed end, and the schedule treated it like an event rather than a slot.

McHale first envisioned the show in 2004 and pitched it to the network in 2006. He worked on The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack and Adventure Time in between. The network eventually asked him to pitch a pilot, and that pilot, Tome of the Unknown, became the catalyst. Production started in March 2014. Most of it happened in Burbank, California, with artists working from other U.S. cities and animation outsourced to South Korean studio Digital eMati.

That is a fast turnaround. Production began in March 2014 and the show was on air by the first week of November.

Wirt, Greg, and the Unknown

The series follows two half-brothers who get lost in a strange forest called the Unknown. Wirt is the older one, a worry-prone teenager who would rather keep to himself than make a decision. He plays clarinet and writes poetry and hides both out of fear of being mocked. Greg is younger, naïve and carefree, and carries a frog he found. Greg’s attempts to give the frog a name are a running gag.

Elijah Wood voices Wirt. Collin Dean voices Greg. Melanie Lynskey voices Beatrice, an irritable bluebird who travels with the boys to find a woman named Adelaide, who can supposedly undo the curse on Beatrice and her family and show the half-brothers the way home. Christopher Lloyd voices the Woodsman, wandering and elderly, who helps occasionally.

The voice cast around them is absurd in the best way: Tim Curry, Bebe Neuwirth, Chris Isaak, Shirley Jones, Thomas Lennon, Jack Jones, Jerron Paxton, John Cleese and Samuel Ramey. The Blasting Company composed the soundtrack.

The Beast and the Edelwood Trees

Stalking the main cast is the Beast, voiced by Samuel Ramey. He is an ancient creature who leads lost souls astray until they lose their hope and willpower and turn into “Edelwood trees.”

That mechanic is the engine of the whole show. The Beast does not chase anyone. He waits. He lets the forest do the work. The Unknown is a place adrift in time, and the thing that kills you there is giving up.

Once they find Adelaide, Wirt discovers she intends only to enslave the boys. Outraged that Beatrice misled them, he takes Greg and abandons her. Wirt, depressed and hopeless after the betrayal, loses hope about returning home. Because of that lack of hope, the Beast is able to claim Wirt as his own. Greg volunteers to take his brother’s place and goes with the Beast. Beatrice rescues Wirt from drowning after he falls into a frozen lake.

Two Brothers, One Frog, One Bluebird

The relationships carry the weight. Here is how the three leads sit against each other.

Wirt and Greg are half-brothers, not full brothers, and the show never makes a speech about it. It just sits there. Wirt’s anxiety and Greg’s total absence of it are the same trait pointed in two directions. Beatrice lies to them to get what she wants for her family, and the cost of that lie lands on Wirt harder than anything the forest does to him.

Why the Week Matters

Ten episodes over five nights is a structure, and Over the Garden Wall uses it. There is no room for a bad episode. The Unknown has to be established, populated and resolved inside a week of broadcasts, and the show does it without a wasted scene.

The production story backs this up. McHale sat on the idea from 2004 to 2006 to a pilot to a March 2014 production start, and the thing that finally got made was short by design. A miniseries on a network that did not make miniseries. The restraint is the achievement.

The Beast is the best argument for the format. An ancient creature who leads lost souls astray until they lose hope and turn into trees needs a slow burn, and a slow burn needs a fixed end. Stretch this over multiple seasons and the Beast becomes a monster of the week. Keep it to ten episodes and he stays a force.

What the Score Gets Right

Over the Garden Wall earns its 9.4/10.

The published score is 9.4/10, with Rotten Tomatoes at 94%. What makes the show work is that nothing in it is decorative. The Unknown is a strange forest adrift in time, but every strange thing in it does a job. The Woodsman wanders. Beatrice lies and then rescues. Greg keeps trying to name the frog and never lands on one. The Beast waits for hope to run out.

The casting does work, too. Samuel Ramey as the Beast against Elijah Wood as Wirt is a real choice — a deep, formal voice against a film actor’s low-key anxiety. That is our read, not a fact the source hands over, but the contrast is audible in what the show does with both of them.

The weak point is that the show is short. Ten episodes is the right number and it is also not enough. There is no second visit to the Unknown, no room to sit with Beatrice’s curse after the journey ends, no epilogue for a frog with a naming problem. That is the trade the miniseries makes, and Over the Garden Wall makes it correctly. A longer version would have been a worse version.

What matters here is the schedule. A week of broadcasts, ten episodes, one story, done. Cartoon Network took a chance on a format it had never run, from a creator who had been carrying the idea for a decade. The soundtrack from The Blasting Company, the voice cast stacked with names who each get one job and do it — none of it is noise.

Over the Garden Wall is a complete thing. That is rarer than it sounds.

animation · Cartoon Network · Elijah Wood · miniseries · Over the Garden Wall · Patrick McHale