Pushing Daisies - Season 1
Premieres: Wednesday, October 3rd at 8:00 p.m. EST
Network: ABC
Creator(s): Bryan Fuller
Starring: Lee Pace, Chi McBride, Kristin Chenoweth
Website: ABC.com
It’s a delightfully simple concept. Ned (Lee Pace), a pie maker, is endowed with the rare gift of being able to revive the dead with a single touch. If he touches them again, however, they will die, and if he lets them live for more than 60 seconds, someone else will die in their stead. He uses this to his advantage, partnering with his private investigator friend Emerson (Chi McBride) to allow murder victims to name their killer, then collect the reward money for finding the criminal. Ned also revives his childhood sweetheart Charlotte (Anna Friel), but given that he can’t ever touch her, their romance promises to be complicated. Rounding out the cast are his two aunts (Ellen Greene and Swoosie Kurtz), who are former synchronized swimmers and profound agoraphobes, and his neighbor Olive (Kristin Chenoweth), who will be disappointed to learn that Ned’s heart belongs to a girl who ought to be dead anyway.
Confession time: I can be a lazy TV watcher, and even when a show catches my interest, I sometimes don’t follow through and miss out. This may be the one fall show, though, that I absolutely cannot miss. The buzz for this show is almost unbelievable, and for once, it doesn’t just seem to be hype. Critics are already raving about it, with USA Today calling it “the kind of show that revives your faith in network TV.” The visual style on display in the show’s promos is like nothing else on television, or even on film, and it’s got such a simple concept with so many directions to go from there. Creator Bryan Fuller has made shows in the past (Wonderfalls, Dead Like Me) with similar high concepts that failed to catch on, but ABC has clearly thrown its weight behind this one. There’s an audience out there for quirky dramedys these days, and the time seems right for Pushing Daisies to touch a nerve and maybe bring TV back to life as well.
