No! Touch it back to life!
Let one of the other ABC shows in the vicinity croak instead! Like … The Bachelor.
Looks like Pushing Daisies will bite the dust after all.
Excuse me while I download Mad Men, season 2, and cry.
Pushing Daisies: pushing my buttons
In brief: Pushing Daisies’ Ned (Lee Pace) is a pie-making gumshoe who can revive the dead with a touch (and, with a second touch, return them to their dearly departed state).
My point: Will someone please explain how I could have possibly overlooked, until now, a quirky show whose main character is a male baker? (Seriously, “late on the draw” should be my middle name. I have no future in journalism.)
About two weeks ago, Pushing Daisies reentered my consciousness during a Warner Bros. lot tour in fabulous Burbank. (Well, la-di-da.) At the studio’s museum, I found myself drawn to the display of the show’s main characters’ costumes.
Yes, they had me at Skinny Tie.
“No, they had you at sci-fi,” my sister insisted on the phone a few days later as I described to her the gist of the show. (“So, in the pilot, he brings his dead childhood crush (Anna Friel) back to life, but like, he can’t touch her, or she’ll die — again! — and they go to the morgue together, and wake the dead, and solve murders with a private eye (Chi McBride) … who knits! …) And frak if little sis doesn’t have a point, although I would wedge the show in closer to fantasy, with a healthy scoop of whatever genre makes you feel like you’re giving yourself a hug.
If I had to (and I’m glad to) try and express the “voice” of the series to you, it would be: whatever voice emerges from a lovechild of Tim Burton and Amelie raised on Care Bears and noir and injected with daily shots of sweet-heartedness.
This show is so unabashedly kind spirited I couldn’t even negotiate how much I liked it for days. And I’m his twee-ness Michel Gondry’s biggest fan.
How could a show that revolves around death make me so cheery? Like, turn-my-day-the-fuck-around cheery.
How was I, Critical Darling, willing to accept all the clearly bad CGI? Or a world where people only kill each other through quaint methods, like exploding scratch-and-sniff books? How could I stomach a town called “Coeur d’Coeurs” (yep: Heart of Hearts), or a protagonist who was (well, actually …) doing a pretty convincing Jimmy Stewart thing?
But really now: a story where some dude and dame are willing to continue to “date” each other knowing they can never ever ever ever touch? Surely that’s where I draw the line.
Or … not. For every precious, old-fashioned element there’s something subversive or out of place: a creepy aunt with an eye patch. Or a line like this: “Do you ever shiver when you pee? That’s how I felt when he spoke.” An allusion to Hitchcock here, a “Jews for cheeses” shirt there. And did I mention the righteous costumes?
But perhaps most of all, there is that whole gender-troubling pie-making thing. It’s just dead sexy.
