The Coming of the End of Pushing Daisies

Pushing Daisies' all too brief existence is drawing to a close, and as I watch these last few episodes I find myself distressed. That was to be expected; I've enjoyed the show, but the reason that I'm distressed is less because of all the good stuff that has happened on the show, but because I see so many more possible storylines. I see new directions that the show has suggested could be explored and other ones that have only been hinted at. We're not going to get those stories.

To explain it another way, I was upset when Seinfeld went off the air. I was upset because, for years on end, I had watched the show on Thursday nights. The characters and their stories were things I had grown up with. To this day they very much shape my perception of certain aspects of life. I can't wait for a table at a Chinese restaurant without thinking about the show; any time I hear about a silly move the Yankees have made I wonder if George Costanza was behind it. I can't sit in a diner and not think about the show, contemplate the elderly in Florida, or park at a mall.

Pushing Daisies hasn't affected me like that. It hasn't caused me to look at pie in a way that I never have before, it hasn't caused me to see a grave and wonder if I could touch the person in it and bring them back to life. Perhaps that's why the show isn't the success that Seinfeld was. But, let's face it, the shows are very different and to compare them in such a way is unfair. It's also not where I was going.

The more general point – and the one I was trying to make – is that some shows distress me when they go away because it feels like I've lost a set of friends. Other shows distress me when they go off the air because there is so much potential that goes unrealized.

Frankly, the person I'll miss most of all is Kristin Chenoweth. Not only is the character of Olive developing far more this season than any of the others on the show, but Chenoweth herself is fantastic. She's gotten chances (small ones) to sing in the past two episodes and a few others this season. Chenoweth, I'm sure, will appear in more films and other television shows (this wasn't her first TV role, it won't be her last), but I'm just not sure I want to wait for that next opportunity to come around and I don't live in New York anymore so I can't just head to the TKTS booth and buy tickets to her latest Broadway show.

Olive Snook has just officially gotten in on the detective game in the past few episodes and it's been one of the best things to happen to the show this season. She's always been a curious character; she's always been trying to find out other people's secrets and is very interested in what's going on around her, but in the last two episodes she's actually been recruited (or forced her way in) to help solve the cases. I think the reason that I like the change is that it has made her more central to the show, but that will soon all come to an end.

It makes me sad, I wonder where Olive Snook would have ended up three years from now. Perhaps she would have been denied soup for her incorrect ordering technique. I would have loved to have seen that.