Love it or hate it, embrace it or revile it, “Pushing Daisies”, which premieres tonight, is hands down the most creative series of the new TV season. It’s so self-consciously quirky and colorful, it makes the bright and buoyant “Ugly Betty” look as drab and dreary as Soviet TV.
Of course, considering its pedigree – between them, creator/producer Bryan Fuller and director/producer Barry Sonnenfeld have worked on the TV series “Wonderfalls,” “Heroes” and “Dead Like Me” and the films “Men in Black” and “Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events” – the sense of comic-book magical realism is no real surprise.
But creativity can be as much a curse as a blessing when it’s put in service of a plot set-up that will be hard to make compelling on a weekly basis. That’s the main problem with the visually stunning, sweetly amusing but ultimately lightweight “Pushing Daisies”, which might have been better as a miniseries – or a knockout TV movie – than as a full series that has to crank out 20-plus episodes a year.
Ned (Lee Pace) discovers as a young boy that his touch has the power to revive the dead — and not just people, but houseflies and his lovable pet dog, too. But there are two big, nasty catches: They can survive for only 60 seconds, or someone else in the vicinity dies in order to take their place in the soul parade of the afterlife; and, if he touches them again, they die again, this time for good.
Ned grows up to be an awesome piemaker – with just one touch, he can keep his fruit amazingly fresh — and opens a joint called the Pie Hole, in his idyllic, storybook hometown of Coeur d’Coeurs. But a local detective, Emerson Cod (Chi McBride), has taken note of Ned’s odd talents and enlists him to help solve murders. Ned brings the corpses back to life, asks them who killed them, gets a reply in under a minute, returns them to permanent sleep and then splits the reward with Emerson.
Everything’s going great until Ned finds out that his childhood sweetheart, Charlotte “Chuck” Charles (Anna Friel), has been killed on a cruise ship and her body is being shipped back home. Of course, he wants to revive her and ask her whodunit, and Emerson wants his money. But Ned decides to keep her alive – never mind that someone else is going to die – and she, in turn, persuades Ned and Emerson to do good works with their power, not just make money. And, thus, a kinder, gentler Mod Squad is born.
But it’s all underscored by the tension of Ned and Chuck’s unrequited love, since, if he so much as brushes up against her, she’s a goner.
Shot in a deliberately exaggerated, color-saturated style, “Pushing Daisies” is beautiful to look at. It seems to inhabit the same sublimely artificial universe in which the 1995 talking-pig fantasy “Babe” took place.
The artifice extends to the dialog, which is not only advanced-screenwriting-class clever, but also delivered in a non-naturalistic way that only emphasizes the cornball goofiness of the entire concept. How creator Fuller is going to keep things interesting as Ned revives/kills dead people each week and continues to be unable to touch Chuck will be one of the TV season’s true wonders.
“Pushing Daisies” is the kind of show that will spawn a devoted cult following that will salivate when the series is released in HD DVD. But the trouble with having a following that parallels that of, say, “Max Headroom” back in the ’80s or “Arrested Development” more recently, is that the cool-kid crowd may not be large enough to keep a network like ABC interested.
Still, whatever “Pushing Daisies”‘ flaws, it’s better than having just another cop or lawyer show on the schedule. Better too much creativity than too little.
