Fairytales are full of horrors, as well as happiness. Too often we remember the happily ever afters and not how we got there: the beautiful woman who eludes a hitman sent by her stepmother; the girl swallowed by a wolf; the chamber full of dead women.
Corpses abound in Pushing Daisies, but this fairytale TV show, as vivid as a picture book, also has plenty of heart and warmth. It tells the story of Ned (Lee Pace), a pie maker who can bring people back to life. He resurrects his murdered childhood sweetheart, Chuck (Anna Friel), and they fall in love – so far, so happily ever after. But once Ned has resurrected someone, he can’t touch them again or they will die – this time for good – so the two lovers are destined to moon over each other, sleep in separate beds and kiss through plastic wrap, never feeling each other’s touch. They must conceal their big secret: he makes the dead live and she is the living dead.
Ned may be ecstatic at the unexpected reappearance of Chuck in his life, but her resurrection is not met with the same joy from others. Olive Snook (Kristin Chenoweth), a waiter in Ned’s shop The Pie Hole, is furious at Chuck’s arrival, as she is secretly in love with her boss. Emerson Cod (Chi McBride), a gruff PI who uses Ned’s gift to solve crimes, now finds he has to split his reward money three ways, with the pie maker and “the dead girl”.
As Snook and Cod, Chenoweth and McBride give the show a much-needed tartness, an essential counterbalance to the sugary romance. Tart too are Chuck’s aunts Lily and Vivian (Swoosie Kurtz and Ellen Greene), two former synchronised swimming legends who are distraught after the death of their niece. Unaware she has sprung back to life, they spend their time drinking vodka, eating cheese and slinging bitter bon mots in a dimly lit, over-furnished house full of stuffed birds.
Pushing Daisies is a mishmash of whodunnit, romcom, musical, farce, horror, melodrama – yet from all these familiar forms, creator Bryan Fuller made something that is not like anything else at all. And 15 years after it first aired, it still pulsates with imagination, wit and emotion. The show often looks like a picture book, with its deliberately flat CGI backdrops and boldly coloured sets in vivid reds, golden yellows and cool greens evoking a far away land – something akin to, but not quite of this world.
The cast makes light work of the dialogue, which pops with rhymes, alliterative banter and double entendres; some of the saucier lines are almost lost amid the mayhem. “Olive can you close up?” Ned asks, leaving the cafe with Chuck. “I think I already did,” she replies sadly, watching the man she loves leave with another woman.
Pushing Daisies received 12 Emmy nominations for its first season, and four wins for its second, but was cancelled before a third, something that has been attributed to disruptions brought about by the 2007-08 Hollywood writers’ strike. A hastily conceived and unsatisfying ending does nothing to mar the wonder of the preceding episodes.
Fuller has said that he made Pushing Daisies to offer an escape from life’s bleaker aspects. “I hoped in the telling of this tale about pies and dogs and love and lost childhoods and reclaimed romance, we could find respite from what was essentially death, death, death,” he told Esquire in 2017. “We’re surrounded by death every day. If anything, it allows us to look with greater affection at the living moments rather than spending time wallowing in depression.” Pushing Daisies could easily have been all beauty and no beast – but beneath the whimsy, the starry-eyed romance and the wacky hijinks, is a touching, bittersweet story of grief, longing and betrayal.
• Pushing Daisies is streaming on 7Plus and Amazon Prime Video.
