Pushing Daisies (ABC)

Though this is a week or so belated, it seems only right to wish a fond farewell to the ABC series Pushing Daisies, which will not be returning for a second season. The whimsical, fantastical, and colorful series, which went off the air for good recently (the show had previously stopped airing, but ABC ran three final episodes to cap the 22 show run), was a welcome change of pace on network television - currently dominated by reality and police procedural programs (just how many CSI and CSI clones are there anyway?).

Pushing Daisies had a nice start, one that relied on a solid cast led by Lee Pace as Ned The Piemaker, the man in charge of The Pie Hole, a restaurant exclusively dedicated to the making and selling of his fresh, wonderfully inventive and classic pies; Chi McBride as grizzled detective Emerson Cod; Brit Anna Friel as Charlotte “Chuck” Charles, Ned’s childhood neighbor and back-from-the-dead girlfriend; Kristin Chenowith as waitress Olive Snook; and Swoosie Kurtz and Ellen Green as Charlotte’s eccentric, ex-Aqua-gymnastic performing aunts (The Darling Mermaid Darlings), Lily and Vivian Charles.

Right from the beginning (the pilot was directed by Barry Sonnefeld) the show had a kind of ethereal, fairy-tale quality to it - with a deep-voiced, witticism spouting narrator (Jim Dale), bizarre costumes, and rich, multi-colored set design that consistently took us to never-never-land (not the ranch). The show was blessed with the eye-winking humor of a Fractured Fairytales cartoon from the 1960s, with visuals like an hour long Starburst commercial, and often boasted surrealistic fantasy sequences, the likes of which Syd and Marty Croft would have been proud. Show producers labeled it a “forensic fairytale,” and it was intended from the start to look like a storybook. The CGI aided visuals drew favorable comparisons to the work of director Tim Burton.

Created by Bryan Fuller, the scripts were full of double entendres and in-jokes, with mischievousness sometimes bordering on the naughty (starting with little ball of energy Olive’s low cut skirts and tops), like live action animation without the animation. The show felt like some kind of bizarre combination of The Wizard of Oz, Pee Wee’s Playhouse, and Alice and Wonderland with mile-a-minute, pun-filled dialogue straight of a 1930s screwball comedy or a 1940s detective noir. The inclusion of vintage automobiles and the distinct lack of modern technology contributed to creating an off kilter reality happening in a kind of nebulous semi-retro time period.

At it’s essence, it was a detective dramedy of sorts, with a touch of the supernatural (bringing back the recently murdered in order to ascertain clues to solve the crime), even if the end result, to whit, the solving of the mystery/crime, often seemed somewhat beside the point. The chemistry between the main players was good. Olive (Emerson Cod called her “Itty-Bitty”), pining over her beloved piemaker, but begrudgingly befriending his beloved, the kind-hearted Charlotte. Ned, he of the unhappy childhood, possessing a gift that was also a curse (and in the beginning also a secret about what he, as a child, had done to Charlotte’s Dad) and Charlotte, the undead - two fated lovers desperately wanting one another, but unable to touch because it would kill Charlotte… again. The Aunts, nursing lifetimes of hurt and disappointment, and mourning the death of their dear niece (we would find out later the relationship ran deeper, or perhaps more dear?). Finally, the grumpy, curmudgeonly, money hungry detective Emerson Cod, the pop-out children’s book hobbyist, who we would discover wanted more than anything to see his long lost daughter again.

There were also a slew of notable recurring characters and guest spots filled by veteran actors like Stephen Root, David Arquette, and, fittingly, Paul Ruebens - each new episode unveiling additional, more absurdly wacky characters then the next. Along the way a bevy of unfortunate victims were decapitated, buried in cement, burned, suffocated, drowned, and thrown in pots of boiling substances, but somehow it was all accomplished with a feathery touch and just the right amount of camp to make it go down easy. Perhaps it was the very juxtaposition of the darkness looming behind all that joviality, color splashes, and smiles that made it work. The stories and the alliteratively named characters always verged on utter nonsense, but mostly things were kept in the realm of the believably unbelievable with a solid cast, enough heartfelt emotion, and that dose of underlying pain and despair, to keep us coming back.

By the end of the season the show did, unfortunately, run out of a bit of dramatic steam, and even before the cancellation became official it felt at times that the storyline would’ve needed to veer into a slightly different direction in order to stay vibrant and avoid the repetition it may have been experiencing. The final episode felt like what it has been reported to be - a rushed attempt to put some kind of capper on the limited run. Pushing Daisies deserved a better farewell, and probably at least another season to see if they could do a bit of re-invention and breathe new life into the proceedings, but we will never discover whether or not that would have happened. Death can, after all, come when we least expect it.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 26th, 2009 at 2:03 pm and is filed under The Small Screen. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.