Pushing Daisies (2007 - ?)

During my TV on DVD summer gluttony, I found myself thinking that it would be nice to have a forum to talk about all these TV shows I watch. Sure, there are lots of places that I could talk about TV, but I wanted a space where I could work out my thoughts. Then I remembered my Angel post from way back in the day*, and I realized that I already have that forum! Thanks, blog!

I give you TV Thursdays, the day of the week on which I shall write about a TV show, currently airing or possibly not. My beloved Pushing Daisies came back to us last night, so it seems as good a place as any to start.

I picked up quite a few new shows last year, in some cases due to vacuums created by other, more beloved shows' cancellations (sniff, Veronica Mars) and in others due to writer's strike programming vacancies. Pushing Daisies was neither. I immediately forced two of my friends to start watching it as I was ensorcelled by the pilot (or Pie-lette, in PD speak). I could you that it appealed to me on multiple, vacant fronts: the dialogue's rat-a-tat-tat of a good Gilmore Girls episode, the mystery-of-the-week (MotW) of Veronica Mars, the surrealist bent of Dead Like Me.

Even so, to define PD by other shows would be a limiting mistake. It's thoroughly original. At its base, it's a procedural, but the MotW, while inventive, is never that important. The basics: Ned (Lee Pace) can wake the dead with a touch of his finger. A second touch makes the person dead, again, forever. If Ned doesn't administer the second touch within 60 seconds, the person lives, but someone else will die in his/her stead. That's how we got Chuck (Anna Friel), Ned's childhood sweetheart and current paramour, who walks around avoiding touching her boyfriend, so she can avoid dying again. P.I. and pop-up book enthusiast Emerson Cod (Chi McBride) uncovered Ned's secret and used it to blackmail him into becoming his business partner. On the MotW front, Ned wakes up the victim, gets the intel on the murder, and then Ned and Emerson solve the case for insurance money. It's a pretty good racket.

None of this is anywhere near as exciting as Olive (Kristen Chenoweth), the sole waitress at Ned's pie shop, The Pie Hole, and Ellen Greene and Swoosie Kurtz as Chuck's grieving aunts Vivian and Lily, respectively. Vivian and Lily Charles were, back in the day, celebrated synchronized swimmers until a rogue kitty litter accident blinded Lily in one eye, turning the sisters into a pair of cheese obsessed recluses.

Right about now you might be thinking, "How does one survive under the weight of all that quirk?" Friends, factors that combine to make the show not oppressive but transcendent:

A) Dead people. Every episode has at least one dead person, and, as bizarrely and humorously as they die, it's still murder.

B) Orphans. Ned's mother is died when he was 10, and his father abandoned him shortly thereafter. Chuck's father died when Ned tried to revive his mother, not knowing how his powers worked, and her mother died in childbirth. Except . . .

C) Season(s) long mysteries. At the end of last season we discovered that Chuck's mother didn't die in childbirth after all. In fact, she never existed! Lily is Chuck's mother, and only Olive knows the truth. Plenty of questions have been raised since that revelation, and only one was answered in last night's season premiere (Chuck's dad was Chuck's biological dad). We also learned that Emerson has a daughter, apparently estranged, and he writes pop-up books to help her someday find him.

D) Details. This show is bar none the most creative I've seen in a long while. Watch a single scene, and you will see the immense work that goes into art design. It's off the wall, old fashioned, and always detailed in such a way that weaves into story.

E) Cast. Obviously a good cast can make or break a show, and it's even more important on a show as out there as this one. It works largely because of everyone's ability to act like this is just the way things are. Sure, the script requires people to balk at something or other at least once an episode, but it's the snappy comic timing and genuine dramatic chops of the cast that make the show really sing.

I know a show centred around a pie-maker with the touch of life sounds crazy, but you'll find it's not if you give it a try. If anything, it's out of this world.

*Boy, I sure was hung up on in the idea for a made-for-TV movie. When am I going to realize that those sorts of rumours almost never come to fruition?