Pushing Daisies

Here’s another one of those shows that just couldn’t keep me hooked, and took me a rather long time to finish, joining the ranks with Angel and The Sopranos (of which I’ve only seen the first season). Neither of those were bad shows really, and it’s the same with this one. Angel picked up later on and I can’t really come up with a good reason why I didn’t enjoy The Sopranos. Pushing Daisies, however, is a bit easier to analyze in this regard. It’s just too damn sweet.

I don’t mean sweet like “Hey that’s a sweet car bro,” I mean saccharine. Pretty much every character’s main features are cuteness and lovability. The relationships are filled with a devotion that borders and often crosses the creepy line, and every “cute” trait that an actor possesses is accentuated in every way possible. Every color is vibrant. The main location in the show is a pie-only restaurant. It’s just a little bit ridiculous.

There is a reason for this though. The show is about death, straight up. Other shows such as Six Feet Under have tackled this in different ways, but Bryan Fuller decided to take the extreme polarity route to make it seem less morbid. Every episode deals with a murder of some wacky sort, and the main cast does there thing to solve it. This thing is the main conceit; Ned, the main character, can bring people back from the dead by touching them. Of course there’s a catch: if he leaves them alive for more than a minute, some other thing of roughly the same size and in the same area must die. He can touch the newly revived again to set them back in their graves before that minute runs out in order to avoid such an occurrence, but there have been a few notable instances where he held back, namely his dog Digby and his girlfriend Chuck. You have to remember that he can never touch them lest they fall from their coil of mortality, which becomes pretty much the main plot thread throughout the two seasons.

Aside from Ned and Chuck we have a few other pretty cool characters. Emerson Cod is a private investigator who uses Ned’s gift to get more money (but he’s pretty nice about it). He’s probably the biggest source of laughs with at least one dismissive one-liner per show, such as “Where'd I put that rat's ass I could give?” Also there’s Olive, who embodies the show’s sweet/cute gimmick to a fault. She’s got a sickeningly high voice to match her diminutive stature and elfin features, coupled with a tendency to show a lot of cleavage whenever she’s in front of the camera. She’s got a thing for Ned which makes for an entertaining but somewhat dreary love triangle. Then there’s Chuck’s two aunts who don’t know she’s alive. One’s a hardass and the other could be Olive’s mother if she were a blonde. Keeping them in the dark becomes another main plot thread, although it’s a bit odd that they dismiss the possibility of letting them in on the secret so finally, stating that the shock would kill them (I think they’d be alright).

So anyway it seems the rest of the world, or at least those with ratings boxes, had the same reaction to the show as I did. It had a truncated first season due to the Writer’s Guild strike of ‘07, and the second season floundered. The final episode’s shooting had wrapped before they knew it was cancelled, but enough people loved the show that they were able to pull together enough money to piece together a sort of resolution montage that really was quite touching. I can’t say I would have been all that excited about a third season, but it was often entertaining in its extremely quirky little way, and television is a bit sadder without it.