#pushing daisies

[virgogods]

[talenlee]

Story Pile: Pushing Daisies

Six thousand, seven hundred and ten days, twelve hours, thirty minutes and zero seconds ago, the television program Pushing Daisies aired for the first time on the ‘abc’ network in the country called the United States of America. It was the work of many people, but one of them who is attributed much of the conceptual work and therefore considered the ‘source’ of the idea is one Bryan Fuller.

It is a beloved and highly regarded example of television from a time I am sure someone considers its golden age, and it is interesting primarily because of the things it could never do, which include successfully deliver a complete story before cancellation.

It is also, after a fashion, a love story, and to that end, I have means to talk about it to you, in this, the smoochiest of months.

As a spoiler warning, I’m intending to mention the plot of this show, and also tell you some things about where the plot goes and what it includes, and further to that, this is a show about cosy murder mysteries and therefore, necessarily there’s a lot of light-heartedly handled black-comedy death, so let’s call that your content warning.

Pushing Daisies is an hour long serialised fantasy mystery sitcom story, it told the story of Ned, a largely unimportant adult man whose day job is making pies for a pie store called the Pie Hole, and whose side hustle is reanimating the dead for fifty-nine seconds in order to help his private eye best friend solve murder mysteries for some lucrative form of reward.

This reanimation is facilitated not by tubes or pipes or mysterious pie-related capacities, but instead by the absolutely unexplained and inexplicable special ability to reanimate the dead with a touch. One minute after this touch, another thing dies, as a form of semi-equivalent exchange, and the life claimed is seemingly somehow proportionate to the original dead thing.

Now that this high concept idea has been put out, there needs to be an additional caveat, which is if Ned ever touches one of his reanimations a second time, then that thing dies immediately, which he discovered by accidentally killing his mother, after he also accidentally killed his best friend’s father.

Then that best friend dies, and Ned brings her back, and can’t bring himself to let her go again, and so instead he kills a coroner and establish a new status quo of him with a girl he’s in love with but cannot touch, his best friend the private eye, a murder each week, and Kristen Chenoweth is there, but you do have to look down to notice her, because she is so very short.

It’s most obvious that this is a show for people to get good and delighted by because it has all the structure and form of Murder She Wrote but made by people who had the opportunity to watch Murder She Wrote and get really into show theatre. It is an incredible set of styles stacked upon one another, with a visual aesthetic that is kind of like if a Dr Seuss book had a props department, a dialogue style that likes to do structural callouts and back-and-forth patter around funny words and names in a way that you call Sorkinesque if you’re a hack and Buffyesque if you’re just as much of a hack but know that women exist, and the actual style of storytelling is a charmingly twee little series of murders.

Calling them murder-mysteries is slightly overstating it, since murder mysteries, typically, rely on you being able to deduce something of the explanation for the events with the information you have in the story. In Pushing Daisies, you can probably half-work out at every stage, but never completely solve, in a true plays-fair style of mystery storytelling. You can feel reasonably clever for seeing the obvious surprise coming, but there’s no reasonable way to see the non-obvious surprise coming, because it inevitably involves the introduction of something you’ve never heard of before. You can tell that it’s not a deeply thoughtful kind of mystery story given that at least twice the ‘mystery’ is yada-yada-yada’d by the narrator explaining oh, here’s how that mystery works, now let’s get to the rest of it.

It is an interesting kind of narrative rocky road. There are marshmallows and nuts and chocolate and rice crispies and every single part is of great, and the whole of them is great. It’s a really properly enjoyable little dessert of a show, and nothing in it could be criticised individually. However, when you are told it is part of a twelve-course meal, there’s expectations that this experience will go somewhere. The second meal? Rocky road. Third? Rocky road. Fifth, sixth, seventh? Rocky road. Eighth? Rocky road, with the promise that something big will happen and then what happens is more rocky road.

Additionally, it’s not like it can introduce more stuff without creating a problem. Specifically, this is a series that works really well when you accept the Just-So Stories way of how things work, and to explain further anything that’s happening in them – especially around the powers of Ned, the one person with specifically explicit supernatural powers – would run the risk of presenting that boggiest of narrative tissues, lore.

And trust me, you do not want tissues in your rocky road.

There is a quandrary that makes up quite a lot of the marshmallows in this work, though, which is the ongoing very sweet relationship between Ned and Chuck. They are both very sweet low-impact pleasurecraft bobbing towards one another on a moored riverside, a sort of high-production high-concept pair of Hallmark movie protagonists, complete with the extraordinarily g-rated kind of lust for one another. I do not dislike these characters but I do not feel very much for them. When they interact and do a charming scene it has all the direct emotional impact of a pantomime, where my immediate reaction is ‘ah yes, that actress and that actor are so good at doing scenes like that one,’ rather than anything about characters named Nuck and Ched.

Particularly, there is some drama milked out of the idea in the opening parts of the series about the fact that these two characters want to have a physical contact and a relationship that grows because of that, and they can’t. This is treated as an extraordinary situation, the idea that you can have two people that want to have sexual contact and can’t, or to project the level of sexiness they have, want a relationship based on physical contact, and can’t, and that this is a quandrary the story presents as unique to Ned’s extremely special abilities.

It is not, by any means. The idea of having a partner with different physical needs and capacities, or whom you cannot physically interface with is extremely common. It’s rare on television, because televisions don’t like representing very real and normal things like people with mobility and access problems, or isolated couples who conduct romance remotely, something extraordinarily normal throughout all of history. It doesn’t like representing characters who have real medical limitations or who are allergic to one another, and if it does, it isn’t likely to represent them capable of maintaining an emotional romantic relationship over their physical wants.

It’s like they’ve never met anyone whose partner comes out ace or something, and considered whether the physical or emotional part of the relationship was the thing that really mattered.

Pushing Daisies is a series that sits atop a lot of lists for people to really wish it got better or got more chance to tell more of its story, and I understand that. After all, all of its parts are Very Good, so how could the whole of it not be Very Good, and how could it not have a Very Good ending. After all, everything up to that point was Very Good! And I get it. It’s cute. It’s charming. It’s sweet.

And it failed before it ever had to deliver on its story or get bloated or bad or stupid or start talking about the negaforce.

And I think that’s for the best.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

[sandrabullockofficia1]

She pushing on my daisies til I chuck

[avonlea71]

Anna Friel - Pushing Daisies

[maladaptv]

i want the worst you could do to me. i want to be ruined beyond comprehension. i want to never see the light of day again. i want it all to be over.

[pumpkinpatchcat]

I've just started watching Pushing Daisies, which will surely go down as one of my favorite TV series watches of all time. At least I could go into the show knowing it got cancelled, but I'm still feeling the grief. So much endearing charm from Ned and Chuck, love it (˘_˘٥)

I'm also reminded of how excited I am to see Lee Pace in Practical Magic 2. Never expected to get a sequel to my favorite movie. This is going to be my witchiest, most mystical autumn in my life.

[persephoning]

If you ever wanted to see a baby faced Hamish Linklater play a ghost who isn't quite a ghost/former horse jockey in the glorious whimsical world of Pushing Daisies, I highly recommend season 1, episode 5.

[softboyshaven]

"Third base is or-" Third base is actually when I tell her about Elizabeth 1 and Robert Dudley and she says "Pushing Daisies core" and I snort laugh and kiss her bare shoulder blade and her hand is in mine and my arm is around her waist and her boyfriend's hand is stroking my back. That's third base actually.