The Show
If you took Tim Burton and Dr. Seuss, stuck them in a room and let them write a TV show, Pushing Daisies would be it. The look and feel of the show remind me of Burton’s crazy creations like Edward Scissorhands, and the quirky narration hearkens back to grade school and my infatuation with Dr. Seuss. The narration doesn’t rhyme, rather it has a poetic and almost childlike feel to it. This show is truly unique in so many ways.
Pushing Daisies is about Ned (Lee Pace). He can bring any dead thing back to life with a single touch. There is a caveat though. Said dead thing can only stay alive for one minute; any longer than that, and an equal life is taken for the one that has just been given. Oh, and one more thing. If Ned touches something he has already brought back to life, it dies, again, this time for good.
Ned owns a pie shop called the Pie Hole. He loves making pies, and in his spare time he solves murders with his private eye friend, Emerson (Chi McBride). Emerson is the only one who knows Ned’s secret, and he exploits it. They continuously walk into the morgue where murder victims lay and Ned touches them. He finds out who killed them, and then he and Emerson collect the reward money.
But all goes wrong when Ned brings a lady back to life who happens to be Chuck (Anna Friel), Ned’s first kiss at the tender age of nine. Once Ned finds this out he decides in haste to not touch Chuck again, because to do so would mean to lose her forever.
To use the word ‘whimsical’ to describe this show would be an understatement. It seems to be set in an alternate universe of extravagantly bright colors, funky shapes, and quirky people (watch this show and then watch Edward Scissorhands and tell me there aren’t similarities).
The dialogue is fast and witty. At times it straddles that line of Gilmore Girls banter, but stays safely away from the inane monologues. It’s shot beautifully. The cinematography makes you feel like you’re in some kind of fairy tale land, that’s almost like the one we live in except for some reason, which is hard to explain, it’s not.
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