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 ou know the TV industry's in weird shape when Pushing Daisies is among the first series to be renewed for a full season. 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. Cult success and a well-loved box set seemed its best hope. But in a year in which established shows such as 24 and Lost don't start till January and a writers strike is on, Pushing Daisies is a hit.
It also happens to be a lot of fun — which is a welcome surprise, because it's about time somebody took the piss out of the deathly serious murder porn that litters the network landscape. As The Wire's David Simon likes to point out, more people die on the Law and Order franchises than in all of real-life Manhattan (and they don't even do real-life crimes anymore. It's all tabloid-friendly murder plots). If the choice is between a dreary un-realism and a colorful one, I know which one I'd choose.
The problem was, with its ersatz design and fantastical (not to say forced) premise, Pushing Daisies seemed from previews to be a quirky take on the procedural whodunit — quirky in that precious, infuriating, Michael Hirschorn kind of way. Disappointed, I had resolved to avoid the show altogether — until I learned that Jim Dale, the nimble, much loved voice of the Harry Potter audiobooks in the U.S., would be supplying the narration. (No one with two ears and a heart could resist that!) Turns out he's actually the most important character on the show, and the key to its success (despite not even being mentioned on the official website's bio page). Dale's warm, authorial presence keeps the show from sinking under the weight of its own eccentricities by setting a tone (wry) and a pace (brisk) for everything that occurs.
As the would-be lovers Ned and Charlotte "Chuck" Charles, Lee Pace and Anna Friel seem practically underused by comparison. They're adorable, but curiously remote. Maybe the writers are a little cowed by the restrictions of Chuck and Ned's romance — remember, they can't touch, or she dies again — and have decided to draw out their relationship gradually, avoiding the histrionics and repetitive catharses of Ross & Rachel or Dave & Maddie. (More on that later.) This was tough to accept when watching Friel. The last time I saw her, she was Alice in the Broadway production of Closer, and she made such an erotic impression on me — hell, she made an erotic impression on Jack Nicholson — that initially I found her cuddly performance here disappointing. But the show isn't so precious, or the main characters' situation so chaste, that a sly sexuality hasn't crept in. The third episode ends with Ned telling Chuck, conspiratorially: "I'm gonna go see if we have any plastic wrap," a moment equally sweet and naughty — and subtle enough to make room for plenty of slow burn later.
Indeed, for all its storybook trappings, Pushing Daisies is an adult exercise, much more of the Grimm school than Disney's. Sure, the dead seem much more agreeable when they come back to life. And yeah, there's a fair amount of cartoonish violence. But this is a world defined almost wholly by grief and loss. Ned and Chuck are connected not just by her return to the living but also by the
Screwball that's more than snappy banter and sexual tension. |
simultaneous — and not unrelated — loss of a parent. 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. (There's also a marked aversion to the lingering, supposedly clinical attention to violent death that characterizes most crime shows today. At one point, a plane even crashes into a building, and it's impressive how breathlessly and discreetly such a loaded image is incorporated into the plot, then utterly forgotten.)
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. Like Moonlighting, Pushing Daisies knows that screwball means more than just snappy banter and sexual tension: it means having the discipline to be in constant pursuit of the good part of the story — the chase, the flirt, the best joke at hand — then  move on to the next thing with giddy momentum. (Also, how coincidental can it be that the premise here is founded on thwarting the exact thing that destroyed Moonlighting and countless other copycats?)
Something should be said of the excellent supporting cast, starting with Kristen Chenoweth who is weirdly sexy as Olive, the obsessive snoop who secretly loves Ned and loathes Chuck. Her occasional bursting into song-and-dance numbers would grate, were they not so seamlessly choreographed and Chenoweth so wildly talented and lusciously assembled. Elsewhere, Swoosie Kurtz and Ellen Greene breeze in and out as Chuck's brassy, depressive aunts, former synchronized swimmers who now lead a Baby Jane lifestyle. But of the peripheral characters, Chi McBride is the most entertaining: as Ned's business partner Emerson Cod, McBride gets to mug greedily and impatiently to frequent, hysterical effect, sometimes using only a word or a pitiful glance skyward. It takes skill to craft a look that says both "Why me?" and its exact opposite — "Of course it'd happen to me" — at the same time.
Does the show occasionally annoy? Sure. Some exchanges come off a bit Gilmore-ish, and even the show's most ardent defender would have to admit the Greene/Chenoweth sing-a-long to "Birdhouse in Your Soul" was a master class in cringeworthy quirk. But those unfortunate interludes are brief, and reliably, Jim Dale's voice soon steers us on to something else charming, silly, bracing, or alluring. If there's one thing you can say about Pushing Daisies, it's not content to let the grass grow beneath its feet.
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| ABOUT THE AUTHOR: |
| Bryan Christian has worked as a writer for Epicurious, GenArt and ID magazine; a web producer for WWD and Condé Nast; and a cameraman for his friends. He's married with roommate and lives in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn.
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©2007 Bryan Christian and Nerve.com.
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