Pushing Daisies

Murder. Resurrection. Mystery. Eternal life. Accidental death. True love. Palindromes. And Pie.

(Mild Spoilers)



Show Summary (courtesy IMDb):
A pie-maker, with the power to bring dead people back to life, solves murder mysteries with his alive-again childhood sweetheart, a cynical private investigator, and a lovesick waitress.

Costuming/Visuals:
For a show that deals with a lot of tragedy, Pushing Daisies is uniquely bright in costuming and sets. Colors are vivid and strong, from the sky to hair to clothing. The aesthetic is purposely evocative of childhood fairy-tales. The color pallet is meant to instill a sense of innocence and wonderment.

This makes Ned (the main character) immediately isolated by virtue of wearing black or gray clothing. It marks him out as different and not necessarily in a good way.

Other characters have costuming that is both a detail of an interesting backstory and a plot device.

Sets have clean lines or welcoming charm. The names used for locations in the show are often palindromic and humorous, such as the Boutique Travel Travel Boutique.

Acting:
The cast is what makes this show work. Character backgrounds and plot developments require chemistry between Ned and Chuck or Ned and Olive. If this had been missing, the entire show would have been lacking in the sweetly sad backdrop that lets it's humor pop.

All four leads are brilliant:

Lee Pace as Ned: Pace does a great deal with body language, keeping himself still and closed off physically from Chuck or his dog. As he can't use his hands and arms much in those situations, he has to do a lot of delivery with just his facial expressions and voice, a pretty demanding task which he excelled at.

Anna Friel as Charlotte "Chuck" Charles: Friel's Chuck changes the most over the two season run of the show. She's by nature and necessity a homebody, but her new lease on life instills a desire to go out and actually live. The tension and changes are fun to watch and very natural.

Chi McBride as Emerson Cod: McBride's comedic delivery is perfect and his grouchy, sarcastic personality is a great foil to Ned's patient hope or Olive's vibrant optimism.

Kristin Chenoweth as Olive Snook: The upbeat, spunky sidekick, Chenoweth delivers a lot of laughter and a musical number or two (She won a Tony in 1999 and was nominated again in 2004 for her turn as Glenda in "Wicked"). Olive and Emerson serve as the two poles of the hope/cynicism spectrum.

Writing:
The pitch meeting for this show must have been interesting to listen to. The central concept is a fairy-tale spin on the Star-Crossed Lovers: What happens when you bring your dead love back to life, but you can never touch her again or you will kill her?

Somehow the writers wrap the tragic premise in a cartoonishly stylized comedy about solving murders through a dangerous, time-limited necromancy.

And it works.

The dialogue is rapid fire, wry, and witty. The punchlines delivered by McBride and Chenoweth made me laugh out loud a couple of times.

The central relationship between Ned and Chuck is tender, sweet, and real. The writers didn't play down the emotional and practical difficulties of loving someone who can't touch you.

One of the best things about this constraint is that it forces the writers to show romance rather than sex. (I'm sure we can all think of shows where writers conflate the two.) While the dialogue does touch on the bedroom from time to time, almost nothing of that nature is shown. Love, as conceived by the show, is much, much deeper and broader than the cover of a dirty magazine.

In fact, this is indicative of a general honesty in the approach the writers of Pushing Daisies took with their world. Life is short, death is certain, and what we do in between matters to our community, our loved ones, and ourselves. Paired with the righting of wrongs and the mending of fences, the show commends virtue and disdains vice without beating viewers over the head with their message.

Action:
As I indicated in the Writing section, much of the action in the show is cartoonishly displayed.

People die in a myriad of ways from being run over, to stung to death by a bees, to deep-fried in Special Recipe, to killed by an exploding dumpling cooker, but the gore is practically nonexistent.

For example, we hear grisly details of a man trampled to death by a horse, but his corpse is mostly unmarred, with the exception of deep horseshoe prints in his skin.

Our heroes are shot at, knocked out, and at one point forced off a cliff and hanging by a branch.

Tension comes from the set up. Ned can speak to murder victims, but if he leaves them alive for more than a minute, someone else nearby will die. Who is an open question.

Because of the necessary secrecy around Ned's abilities and Chuck's un-dead nature, snooping investigators, unaware family members, and past acquaintances all pose a serious threat.

Summary:
Pushing Daisies was a quirky, funny, and tragically short lived series. The premise is interesting, the acting engaging, and the writing delightful. If you're in the mood for fun, YA-style mystery this show is definitely worth your time.