Bryan Christian reviews ABC’s new show Pushing Daisies. His points:
“It's a whimsical, deeply stylized, romantic murder-mystery
fairy tale with a weird, complicated conceit: boy meets girl, boy raises girl
from the dead with a magical touch to solve her murder, boy and girl solve
other murders in similar fashion but can't touch each other, or girl dies again.
For all its storybook trappings, Pushing Daisies is
an adult exercise, much more of the Grimm school than Disney's….It's a
worldview borrowed from other thanocentric shows like Six Feet Under or Dead Like Me (the latter also created by Pushing Daisies Bryan Fuller), and it
makes the show's casual approach to mortality seems weirdly earned.
With its breakneck adherence to the conventions of genre, Pushing
Daisies hews close to the classic screwball tropes. In fact, the show that
it most resembles is Moonlighting, which had a similar affinity for
broad, adult comedy, frustrated lust and oddly confessional culprits.”
I saw part of an episode and I couldn’t watch the whole
thing. It was too cloying, brightly colored and contrived for my taste. Maybe if I’d managed to watch more than half an episode
I would have liked it. But I’ll never know because there’s a limited number of TV
hours in my week and Pushing Daisies
is no longer on my DVR list.
