Banks might be collapsing, Wall Street may be crumbling… but all is well now that Pushing Daisies is back on ABC!
If you’ve never seen the show, the plot is like this: Ned is a man with a special gift: he can bring the dead back to life. There are two caveats to his power, however: 1) the dead can only be alive for 1 minute, or else something else of equal “life value” dies; and 2) once Ned touches a dead person twice, that person is dead forever. Ned discovered his gift in his hometown of Coeur d’Coeurs when his golden retriever Digby accidentally runs into the path of an 18 wheeler. Later that same day, Ned’s mother dies of an aneurysm. Ned touches her, which brings her back to life. Unfortunately, in doing so he kills the father of Charlotte Charles (“Chuck”), his next door neighbor and childhood sweetheart. Ned also accidentally discovers caveat #2 when his mother kisses him goodnight that same evening, killing her forever. Ned’s father then sends him away to the Longborough School for Boys, where, in bouts of loneliness and depression, Ned tries to “recreate” his mother’s love by baking pies. Ned eventually turns this talent into “The Pie Hole”, a pie restaurant in an unnamed city. There he employs a waitress named Olive Snook, a tiny blonde that’s secretly in love with Ned. Unfortunately, The Pie Hole doesn’t make a lot of money, so Ned has teams up with Emerson Cod, a private investigator. Ned and Emerson go to morgues and funeral homes, where Ned touches dead people to find out who killed them. Emerson then collects the reward money and splits it with Ned. In the pilot episode, Emerson and Ned find out that Chuck has been murdered whilst on a cruise. Ned touches her just to talk to her, and can’t bring himself to touch her again, causing the corrupt funeral home director to drop dead. Ned and Chuck live happily ever after… even though they can never touch again, and even though the two have some serious secrets between each other.
The show is like nothing else on TV. It’s part noir mystery, part sweet love story (a la Amelie), taking place on what looks like the set of a Tim Burton film. Daisies features a new mystery each week, and although the subject matter is disturbing (they are solving murders after all), the storylines are filled with wit and improbable (but ultimately believable given the context). And the dialog! The show is jam packed with puns, alliteration and rhyming… although it’s not hard to understand, it does come at a machine-gun pace, so bring your “A” game with you when you watch the show!
Oh, and Daisies has simply breathtaking visuals. In fact, Pushing Daisies is the show the HD was invented for! Although many might be put off by the rich visuals, you should really give the show a chance! You can catch it online at abc.com if you’ve missed it. But it’s a really, really, really good show. As someone from the DVD Talk forums said: “I consider myself a highly cynical, pessimistic person, but there’s just something about this show that is able to give me the warm fuzzies. Every week I get to feel like the Grinch when he rediscovers he has a heart.”
I’m not going to do exhaustive recaps of the show (like I do for Mad Men), but I would like to point out some cute things from last night’s episode:
– Olive almost bursting into a Sound of Music tribute before being “shushed” by Mother Superior.
– The nuns’ turquoise habits.
– Lily’s color-coordinated eye patch.
– Olive, trying to rid herself of a secret, learns another.
– “Mother Superior” was played by Diana Scarwid, who played the adult version of Christina Crawford in Mommy Dearest. She also played the mom in Wonderfalls, another show created by Bryan Fuller.
– Another Bryan Fuller reference in this episode comes when Ned fills in as the receptionist. He says that he’s from “Happy Time Temp Agency”, a shout-out to another Fuller series, Dead Like Me.
– Pigby!
– Chuck’s “special pillow” cut close to home.
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