"Pushing Daisies": A Roald-Dahl-Esque World

Published: October 16, 2007 at 08:18 PM GMT
Last Updated: October 16, 2007 at 08:18 PM GMT

By Lisa LaValle

Remember all those times you were flipping through the channels, looking for that perfect combination of crime procedural, love story, and quirky dramedy with a sci-fi twist? Your prayers have been answered. I am pleased to introduce Pushing Daisies, a show that really and truly is like nothing else on TV. Either that or it's like everything else on TV, all mushed together into one sweet, funny, Technicolor package.

First of all, this episode was titled "Pie-lette." Get it? Pi-lette? Pilot! They've reeled me in already.

By now, if you're at all interested in this show, you've read a few reviews, or at least know the basic plot: Ned (Lee Pace) has a power. If someone or something dies, he touches it and it comes back to life. If he touches it again, it goes back to being dead. The catch? If he leaves it re-alive for more than a minute, someone or something else has to die in its place. He learned that last part the hard way when he was nine years old - his mother died so he brought her back to life, thinking nothing of it until his neighbor's father dropped dead in the yard next door. That neighbor is Charlotte Charles (Anna Friel, who looks like Sigourney Weaver and Tina Fey morphed together), whom Ned calls Chuck, and she's best summed up as the love of his life.

Ned is a piemaker first and foremost (I love how the narrator refers to him as "the piemaker") and a renegade murder solver second. He has teamed up with Emerson Cod (Chi McBride) to revive murder victims just long enough to ask them who killed them and then collect the reward money. Seems like a pretty sweet (and lucrative) gig, until the murder victim is Chuck. She was mysteriously strangled with a plastic bag at the ice machine while on a cruise so when Ned wakes her up, she doesn't know the answer to his question. Sixty seconds tick by and the funeral director (who is unfortunately on the toilet like Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park) gets it.

As if the oversaturated colors and wacky camera angles hadn't convinced you yet, here's where the show breaks the mold. In its simplest form, this concept would run something like this: In every episode, Ned and Emerson have to solve a wacky murder. But the man in charge, Bryan Fuller, who brought us such quirk-fests as Dead Like Me and Wonderfalls, has added the element of a revived Chuck. Here, things could still be formulaic: In every episode, Ned somehow has to keep from touching Chuck, but she doesn't get it. We'd be in for a whole lot of frustration, anger, oops-he-almost-told-her-but-phew-he-didn't, over and over again. But here's the difference: Ned tells Chuck about his power. Chuck wants to know who killed her just as badly, so she teams up with Ned and Emerson to figure it out. It's definitely a much more interesting way of going about it. Chuck's in on it, and she has to try just as hard as Ned does not to initiate contact. Neither of them wants her to be dead, or as Ned says near the end of the episode, "I just thought my world would be a better place with you in it."

The other layer is something that Ned does keep secret. He is responsible for Chuck's father's death, but she doesn't know it, and that's where the tension lies. Sure, Ned revives Chuck because he likes her, but he also wants to somehow make up for the fact that he killed her father. Way more potential for emotional distress with this hanging over his head.

Besides all the backstory, Ned and his team do solve the mystery of Chuck's death (which I thought would be a multiple-episode arc, but I'm okay with it). Turns out she got the cruise trip for free in order to pick up some plastic monkey figurines. Her murderer wanted those monkeys, but couldn't get back in her room because her key had fallen in the ice machine. The monkeys wind up at Chuck's aunts' house, where she was raised after her father died. Of course the aunts (Swoosie Kurtz and Ellen Greene) are wacky, but they're not like any wacky aunts I've ever seen. Lily and Vivian are identical twins and former synchronized swimmers with social phobias and only three working eyes between them. The murderer goes after the monkeys, but is shot by one-eyed Aunt Lily as he tries to kill Ned. Luckily Chuck was just out of her one eye line or else there would have been some 'splainin to do.

We still don't know who the killer is (just that he's dead) but we sure know why he wanted those monkeys. As Ned and Chuck make the figurines kiss (aww), they break open the plastic coating to find... gold. Two solid gold monkeys: Worth murdering an innocent young lonely traveler for? Apparently.

There are plenty of other things I loved about this show: Ned and Chuck holding their own hands because they can't hold each others', the interaction between Ned and Emerson, Ned's device for petting his dog that he revived when he was nine, and all the other kooky details. The dialogue is great too - if at times a little too quick for me to catch everything. A favorite exchange: when Chuck tells Ned, "You can't just touch somebody's life and be done with it," and Ned replies, "Yes I can. That's how I roll." There were plenty of potentially schmaltzy lines like, "I suppose dying's as good an excuse as any to start living," but in this semi-fantasy, Roald-Dahl-esque world, they didn't come off as cheesy or unbelievable. In the universe of Pushing Daisies, they sound just right.

To communicate with or to be contacted by the executives and/or companies mentioned in this column, link to JackMyers Connection Hotline.