VIDEO: A preview of Pushing Daisies
There’s a fine line between “whimsically surreal” and “Oh God please make it stop.” ABC’s PUSHING DAISIES (Wednesdays at 8 pm) walks both sides at once. I can’t remember another series that was so enjoyable one minute and made me want to tear my own head off the next.
Pushing Daisies had one of the best pilot episodes, ever. Part fairy tale, part detective noir, it created an eccentric candy-colored universe that sucked you in by the hypnotic force of its ingenuity. Produced and written by Bryan Fuller (in Wonderfalls mode rather than Heroes) and directed by quirkmeister Barry Sonnenfeld (The Addams Family movies), the Pushing Daisies pilot introduced the fantastic tale of a young piemaker who can bring the dead back to life with one touch — and will kill them for good if he touches them a second time. Ned (Lee Pace), the piemaker, is a laconic loner who shrinks from intimacy. He reluctantly helps curmudgeonly private eye Emerson Cod (Chi McBride) collect rewards for solving murder cases — he wakes the dead, asks them to name their killers, and puts them back to eternal sleep. One of these victims, a young woman who was murdered while on a holiday cruise, turns out to be his long-lost childhood sweetheart, Charlotte “Chuck” Charles (Anna Friel). Once Ned has awakened her, he can’t let her go, and so his sleeping beauty gains a second chance at life. But Ned’s gift comes with a price; for everyone he revives past 60 seconds, someone else has to die. Details, shmetails.
Anyway, Ned and Chuck pick up where they left off — they are, by necessity, as chaste as nine-year-olds. They can’t touch, of course, but they find other ways to connect while not connecting (kissing through Saran Wrap, holding their own hands and pretending they’re holding each other’s). Meanwhile, back at Ned’s diner, the Pie Hole, lovelorn waitress Olive Snook (Kristin Chenoweth) pines for Ned and resents the intrusion of the mysterious Chuck. Every fairy tale needs a narrator, and this one has the king of narrators, British actor Jim Dale, the voice of the Harry Potter audiobooks in the US.
The pilot was dazzlingly weird and shamelessly romantic. Friel’s effervescent Chuck was instantly lovable, and Pace’s Ned was sweet yet wry. Everybody talked fast and quippy, as if this were an old-fashioned screwball comedy, the zonky color palette was eye-popping, the retro fashions on the women were fun and . . . well, it all seemed special, in a good way. But a handful of episodes into the season, Pushing Daisies often strikes me as special in that not-so-good way — you know, as in “precious” and “pukingly coy.” Take the narration. Each time Dale introduces a character, he tells us the person’s exact age (like, “40 years, nine months, 16 days, five hours, and 43 minutes”). The first million times, it was mildly amusing. Now, not so much. The flashbacks to blank-faced little Ned’s lonely childhood at boarding school, where he kills things and reanimates them, are similarly repetitive. And I have come to dread Chenoweth, who bustles into scenes, elbows jutting, Charlie Brown head bobbling on her tiny stick-girl body, and turns on the Big Acting as if she were projecting to the last row of a Broadway balcony. When she burst into a musical number in the second episode, the anti-Daisies devil inside me nearly pitchforked my inner pro-Daisies angel into Swiss cheese.
Still, I can’t give up on Daisies because there’s much to like. Chuck is endearing, with her fresh-faced fizz. Ned’s work as a baker — he crafts pies by hand with fruit brought back to sweet life by his touch — is an enchanting metaphor for the nourishment that love and intimacy bring to a cold, fast-food world. And though the mysteries that Ned, Emerson, and Chuck take on each week aren’t exactly Miss Marple-league, they’re at least Veronica Mars-league, and involving enough to make you wish the show took them more seriously.
But Pushing Daisies is too compulsively ironic to take anything very seriously. There are tender images of love, loss, and the yearning for connection, but they’re almost buried alive under all the Crayola-colored camp. Why should we give our hearts to a show that seems to fear sincerity so much that it shrouds itself in artifice? PushingDaisies has the potential to be a luscious homemade apple pie, but it would rather be a Twinkie.
Speaking of intimacy issues: who could have imagined the bleak day when explicit sex plus naked bodies plus HBO did not equal must-see television? Well, sound the air-raid sirens, because that disaster has arrived. TELL ME YOU LOVE ME, which is nearing the end of its first season in HBO’s once-sacred 9 pm Sunday slot, is a staggering miscalculation from the channel that defined adult drama. TMYLM follows sexually challenged patients in counseling with a wise, white-haired therapist played by Jane Alexander. There’s a young woman with a sex addiction, a yuppie couple falling apart over the wife’s desire to have a child, and a tired married couple with kids and no sex life. The show consists of earnest yakking, arguing, crying, and screwing, without any compelling context. And this happens, or not-happens, week after week. Sure, in real life, people make the same mistakes over and over. But in art, that constitutes a comedy, and TMYLM is definitely not a comedy. Well, not intentionally.
