Esquire.com is pitting cancelled-too-soon TV shows against one another in a head-to-head, winner-takes-all bracket. It's the TV Reboot Tournament. Vote now and see which comes out on top. We're also revisiting some of our favorite unjustly defunct gems through interviews with showrunners and performers. Read what creator Bryan Fuller has to say about his previous killed projects, his resilient Hannibal, and his devoted fans.

With Dead Like Me, Pushing Daisies, and Hannibal, Bryan Fuller has made a career out of finding both the humor and humanity in what would largely be considered the darkest of subject matters: death. And it's a good thing. Because up until this year, a third season of any one series has eluded Fuller.

Sure, Fuller's work has been widely acclaimed and recognized. Pushing Daisies alone was nominated for three Golden Globes and won seven of its 17 Emmy nominations during its too-short life. But for just about every series that he has actually gotten on the air (add Wonderfalls, which was canceled after four episodes), Fuller has had another one of his small-screen creations stopped in its tracks (a planned reboot of The Munsters called Mockingbird Lane, which only aired a special; an adaptation of Augusten Burroughs's first novel; No Kill, a pet project of Fuller's and his first bona fide sitcom). While Fuller admits that he always takes rejection personally, he's not about to write off any one project or character. He's famously written characters from his past series into his current ones, and he already knows what he would do if given a second chance to breathe new life into any one of his dearly departed earlier shows. (Are you listening, Netflix?) And he may just get his chance, as Daisies fans have come to our TV Reboot Tournament en masse and catapulted it into the Final Four.

Dead Like Me was your first series as showrunner, but was it the first series that you actually created?

Yes. Many hymens were broken on Dead Like Me.

It premiered in the summer of 2003, but when did you begin writing it?

I had written it my last year at Star Trek: Voyager. While we were winding down that year, I was writing the pilot for Dead Like Me on spec, and writing it almost as a writing sample because I had only been writing for Star Trek and my manager told me, "Nobody's going to read that so you need to write a spec that serves as your calling card." He said I could write a script for another show or write something original and asked if I had any original ideas. I pitched him three and he said, "Write Dead Like Me. I can sell that one."

Between Dead Like Me and Six Feet Under, death was pretty in vogue. But what's interesting about Dead Like Me is the way it deals with the idea of life after death so literally. How did the concept come about?

I had gone to a lot of funerals as a child, so I was more than just a little death-obsessed. And I had always loved horror films, so I wanted to do something in the horror genre but wanted it to be sweet and charming at the same time. Because there's a difference between watching horror, where you can leave it behind, and writing horror, where you have to live in it for months and months at a time. It becomes very oppressive. At the time I was also very in touch with the post-college malaise of the twentysomething who didn't know where to go or what to do. I was temping before I got the job at Star Trek, and I really wanted to relate my experiences as a temp through a character that also had something to say about life. So here was this young woman who was avoiding being alive and engaging in life and the universe kind of threw it in her face and said, "Okay, you avoided being alive but now you are dead and you still have to deal with all of the problems of being alive for eternity." There is no escape from that and that seemed like the fun thing to explore with a young woman.

Was the show close to what you originally envisioned?

Well, the world became much smaller than what I had imagined. I imagined a great death set piece in every episode, with a startling visual representation of what every individual imagined as their death, and what death meant to them translated through a happy thought or a happy image. There was a greater mythological sense in the show that slowly got weeded out because we simply couldn't produce it where we would understand what these Gravelings were that set things into motion. They were the kind of the Rube Goldbergs of death who would set a variety of traps that ultimately led to someone's death. So understanding what they did and the difference between the Grim Reapers, who pop the souls, and the creatures who actually set the death in motion and the relationship between those two entities was something that was going to be explored much more. There was also an interesting aspect of Georgia Lass, the main character, in the pilot: She starts to suspect that her father is homosexual and then realizes what a miracle her life was because if her father is gay and had followed his true path he wouldn't have set out to marry a woman and create a child. But because of various influences he did, so she started to realize what a fluke her life actually was... So it was another aspect of you-are-who-you-are and the design is random and accepted and that is what life is. It was another philosophy of the show that kind of got whittled away in the process as it kept going.

You left the series pretty early in the first season. Why?

Part of it was because we simply did not have the ability to make the show in the way that I had imagined. So it was a little bit of a bait and switch where it was like, "Oh my gosh, let's do this great show," and then actually, "No, we're not going to do this show that you pitched and that you wanted to do. We are going to do a radically different version of the show." And while that was happening I was developing Wonderfalls with Todd Holland... So I was a little like, "Fuck this noise!" And then on the other hand I had the opportunity to work with Holland who was openly gay and we had this gay character on the show and I got to use that part of my voice as well. Then of course the moment I left Dead Like Me, they made the gay character straight... So it was a great move for me to make at the time.

Did you continue watching the show after you left or was it too difficult to see what happened to what you had created?

Not a frame of it. I love the people at MGM Television now, they've got some great people over there, and it is a show that I would love to remake now because there is so much that I wanted to do with it that, 15 years ago, I wasn't able to do. So it feels like it's ripe for reinvention and also ripe to tell all of those interesting stories about what it is to be a young person in this world now, which is a little bit different than it was even then. We were evolving, or devolving, as a society so rapidly. You look at the awareness of the bullying conundrum with youth today and what a huge part that plays in shaping identity, whether in terms of building up the strength to handle and navigate it or buckling under the pressure and suiciding. We are a different society just because of that awareness and also a different society for other awarenesses, too. Gender identity, which has become so common in our conversations now, is something you wouldn't have really talked about 15 years ago. Transvestites and transsexuals and transgendered people were still marginalized in such a way that it was still a comedic topic because of the perceived absurdity of that person's situation. Now we are in a world where we are so much more educated on what it is to have a body dysmorphia issue and what that means for young men and women now who are growing up in a new awareness of gender roles and gender issues. And also a willingness to transcend those roles and to mix and match and to make your own plate of whatever you want to serve yourself up. And we've also gone completely backward when you see something like Ferguson and go, "Oh my gosh, we haven't changed at all." Whereas gender identity issues have made some leaps and bounds in the last 15 years, racial issues still feel mired. And that's with a black president.

So next came Wonderfalls, which ended up getting cancelled after four episodes. Do you remember the moment you found out?

I was sitting in the office. We had just finished filming the 13th episode and I was editing and I was breaking the back nine in case we got a pickup to go beyond the initial 13-episode order. And Todd called and said, "Well, we're done." And I said, "What do you mean, 'We are done?'" And he said, "We've been canceled." My first thought was, "I'm going to send a wax lion to every network executive and try to get them to pick up the show." So we sent DVDs of the first 13 episodes with the wax lion and a letter from myself and Todd to everyone. If you were even related to somebody who ran a network, you probably got you wax lion and a set of DVDs... I was determined to tell the story in whatever way I could and then, of course, everybody said, "Thank you for the DVDs and the wax lion. Your show is lovely but it is a Fox show and it has been branded as a Fox show and it is rare that anybody would pick up somebody else's seconds." So it was a slow grieving process. I was holding out hope that someone would get the package and see the show and recognize something in it that made them excited about broadcasting it, but with every rejection letter that came back I sort of slowly got used to the idea, "Well, this is the end." It wasn't as intense of a burn, because we fought so long to try to keep it on the air and it just didn't work. At that time there also weren't as many outlets for television series. Now everybody has got their channel and there are interesting networks popping up every day.

And in today's television landscape, it's almost become a coup for a network or outlet to come in and "save" a show. Even just looking at The Killing or Community. Do you think the outcome for Wonderfalls would have been different had it been on the air today?

I think it probably would've had a better chance but not necessarily a slamdunk. I would've sent out more wax lions and DVDs, but the outcome could have been very much the same. And I am thrilled to see that Community is living on and that The Killing got another season after it was canceled. And I am apoplectic with excitement about Twin Peaks' return on Showtime. I love that stories we were so excited about earlier in our lives get to return. I think there is something about this era of society that is incredibly sentimental in ways that are both wonderful and stifling at the same time. I am thrilled that there is going to be a new Star Wars movie. I am thrilled that there's going to be another Terminator movie. I am thrilled that they are still making Star Trek movies. I am thrilled at all of those things, yet there is an interesting trap where you get seduced by the idea that, "I love that they are going to be telling this story again and I get to experience it," and then you harken back to the days when you saw a wholly original movie and hadn't seen anything like that before and what a rare experience that is now.

Was that something that concerned you with Hannibal? Yes, you are creating something new out of it, but you still have to feed into a well-known story that's already been put in place.

Absolutely. It was challenging for a couple of reasons: The brand had kind of been oversaturated, overexposed, and de-fanged in a way. Once you see your villain as a young child and get to know how they became the villain, they are immediately less interesting, because the mystery has been taken away from you. Nobody cares why Darth Vader is Darth Vader, they just want Darth Vader to be as cool as possible and showing him as a little kid actually takes away his power. And Hannibal Rising took a lot of Hannibal's power away from him. I love The Silence of the Lambs, I love Manhunter, I love Red Dragon, and I love Ridley Scott's Hannibal movie... Then Hannibal Rising came along and the character sort of died. Everybody lost interest in him because they are like, "You showed him with his pants down and we didn't like his underwear." I saw it as a great opportunity to not only reintroduce this character that everybody is fully aware of, but also to reexamine him and give him a life that no one has seen in any of the adaptations before. So I felt like there was new real estate to be explored that made it very attractive. And the idea of bringing that character to a television audience and being able to tell the story of this friendship between two heterosexual guys that is so intimate and passionate and destructive was really kind of an opportunity for me to deconstruct male friendship in a way that I had always been fascinated with as a gay man, being outside of a heterosexual male dynamic, where I look at heterosexual male friendships in a completely alien way. I don't identify with so much of that dynamic that I was like, "I want to explore that in a way that is totally psychological, completely cinematic, and as beautiful in its filmmaking as the title character itself."

Dead Like Me, Pushing Daisies, and Hannibal.

You've created a number of other series that didn't make it very far along in the process. Do you always take it personally or is being sensitive a waste of time in your business?

Oh absolutely, you take everything personally. I take everything personally. Though with something like Sellevision, because it was an adaptation [of an Augusten Burroughs novel], it stings a little bit less than an original that doesn't get picked up. There is a script that I was so keen to do called No Kill about a no-kill animal shelter and the hijinks that ensued with the people who like animals more than people. So that one stung... It is so hard with pilots because the best pilots that I have read are the ones that never get picked up because they seem too cable-y or they are too fresh or they are coming at it from an angle that is, for me as an audience member, very exciting and I think, "Oh God, I want to watch that show." You look at what happened with Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and Netflix picking that up and it's fantastic! It is such a breath of fresh air. And then you think, "Could they have done that all on NBC?" Maybe they couldn't have, maybe they could have... I have found, with NBC in particular, that this regime has been incredibly supportive about trying different things. The fact that they have kept Hannibal on the air for three seasons despite mediocre ratings is a testament to a hunger for new ways of telling stories.

We keep skipping over Pushing Daisies, which is one of those shows that has such great critical acclaim yet wasn't able to make it past the second season. What do you think is the main reason it didn't continue?

I think we were on the cusp of that era of audience erosion. Where the numbers that we were canceled at would be enough today to keep us on the air and safe and within a bubble of protection, because we were canceled with like six million viewers. It was at the beginning of all of these cable channels really upping the ante in terms of programming quality entertainment and it was before the networks had accurately gauged how audience erosion was going to affect everything, because networks were hemorrhaging viewers. Also, we were off the air for a long time because of the Writers' Strike. We sort of ended January and weren't on the air again until October. So there was a little bit of "We forgot about it." And also it was heightened in a way that may have cleared a path for other heightened shows on network television. We were kind of the first fairy-tale show. We were an original fairy tale, but we used all of the trappings of fairy-tale storytelling. And I think doing 22 episodes of Pushing Daisies would probably be too much. It should be a smaller volume of episodes for a season, maybe 10 or 13... So I think that was probably a factor as well. And it was deceptively complicated in that it was exploring a relationship that you can't touch, and what does that say about where we are in society as people who make connections online without touching? We do so much in our world without actually stepping outside the door to see the world that it felt like an interesting metaphor. I think it may have been too much dessert for your eyes in some way.

Your fans have come out strong to support Pushing Daisies in our TV Reboot Tournament. It knocked out Veronica Mars and The Critic, and even kicked Chappelle's Show's ass. Does the continued passion of your fans for the show, even all these years later, ever surprise you?

It does and it doesn't. I suppose Pushing Daisies is still very much alive in my heart and packed with so many things I love, from bees to dogs to pies to zombies, that when I see the enthusiasm for the show even today, I just think, "Oh, they love bees and dogs and pies and zombies, too."

What's the one lingering question Pushing Daisies fans want answered?

The most frequent question I hear is "When is it coming back?"

If you could get a second crack at any one of your shows, would Pushing Daisies be it?

Probably. If I got a second crack at any of them I would take it, because I know exactly what I would do with the Wonderfalls movie. I know exactly what I would do with a new version of Dead Like Me. And with Pushing Daisies, I would do more of the same and continue to tell the story. There is still so much story to be told, whether it is in a stage musical or a limited series or a film.

Are there any series, not your own, that you'd love to see make a comeback?

Star Trek on TV again would be a lovely thing. Also, Dark Shadows. It's time for Barnabas Collins to rise and shine.

You've made of habit of bringing characters and places from previous series into your new ones. Even George from Dead Like Me popped up as Georgia on Hannibal. Is that your way of keeping these older stories going?

I guess it's just my way of dealing with the grief. Because it is like, "Oh, I loved working with Ellen Muth. Wouldn't it be fun to invert that character in some way on Hannibal and to be able to work with Ellen again?" So, A, it is an opportunity to work with actors that I absolutely adore and, B, it is a little salve for my wounds.

Your fans have dubbed this throughline between series as the Fullerverse. Did you set out to create a television world that's all your own?

Not specifically, no. It stemmed more from a selfish motivation to work with actors I adore, and also a way for me keep previous shows alive in my own small way. It's part of my proactive grieving process. Repeated cancelations will do that to you.

From a personal, professional, and even psychological perspective, would you rather that a series you created never make it to air in the first place or that it be canceled abruptly and at least exist in some form?

I would say 95 percent of the time it would be, "Let's create it and have it out there so that it exists." Only with Mockingbird Lane, part of me thought it wasn't its time. And that if we had just sat on it and held on to it we could have actually done something really special with it. I am thrilled that Mockingbird Lane got made and that I got to work with Eddie Izzard and Jerry O'Connell and Portia de Rossi and Charity Wakefield and a really, really fantastic cast. But part of me thinks that there was so much story going on that I would have traded making that one episode for waiting a little bit and figuring out the best way to tell the story... It just wasn't ready yet to come out of the oven the way it did. That's the only exception.

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