Pushing Daisies

We all knew Pushing Daisies wasn’t going to make it to a third season; the question was whether it would get a complete second season. It looks like not, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Television shows used to use music sparingly. Good luck finding a silent moment now.

Because ABC isn’t showing tomorrow night’s Obama campaign special, they’ll be showing a new episode of Pushing Daisies. This could actually be a good thing for PD, as it’ll be the only non alternative for people who have either made up their minds already or just don’t like infomercials, political or otherwise.

Watching this week’s Pushing Daisies, it occurred to me that some elements of this show’s formula are surprisingly similar to Arrested Development, even though the shows are very different in tone. Both shows have deliberately absurd, outlandish plots and over-the-top eccentric characters. Both shows have an omniscient, detatched third-person narrator who constantly tells us what the characters are thinking and what they’ve done in the past, as well as filling in large plot gaps with his calm storytelling. (And both shows were accused, with some justice, of over-using the narrator.) Both shows try to end every episode by having at least one of the characters realize that the crazy events of this week’s story have some kind of parallel to their own personal problems, and learn some kind of lesson from that. Almost every episode of Arrested Development had a moment near the end where the narrator would tell us something along the lines of: “That’s when Michael realized that what [his father/Tobias/wacky eccentric guest character] was doing was exactly the same as what he was doing to his son.” And Pushing Daisies usually has a similar moment where Ned realizes that the mistakes made by one of this week’s guest characters are the same mistakes he’s making in his own life, and the narrator informs us that Ned has learned his lesson about letting people go, learning to live with being different, etc.

I didn’t expect the season premiere of Pushing Daisies to do the kind of numbers the series premiere did, but getting beat by Knight Rider? That hurts a lot. I hope they can turn this around, though there are a limited number of things that can be done to “punch up” a Bryan Fuller series; his shows are so stylized that the options for re-tooling are very limited. (Dead Like Me already proved that; the network fired Fuller, re-tooled the show, but it still felt pretty much the same as it was when Fuller ran it, just not as good.) The producers could and very well might add some new characters to Pushing Daisies, but any new character they could add would inevitably be as twee and cute as the other characters; in Fuller’s world, there aren’t a large range of ways for characters to act.

I know Pushing Daisies is so sugary-sweet it can cause cavities; and that’s to say nothing of all the pie puns and silly names and the endless repetition of this week’s catchphrase (in the season premiere it was “Betty’s Bees” that got repeated about 300 times). But I like it. I have high tolerance for whimsy, as well as goofball private-eye shows where this week’s mystery somehow reflects back on the inner lives of the main characters. The show it most resembles is Moonlighting — goofy mysteries that allow the main characters to reflect on their personal problems; rapidly-delivered, pun-laden scripts; lavish production values. It hasn’t yet shown an ability to stretch into different kinds of episodes the way Moonlighting did with its Shakespeare and film noir parodies, and it would help if Pushing Daisies would similarly do some episodes that depart from the basic formula. (Yes, I am saying that Pushing Daisies needs more gimmicks. Paradoxical, isn’t it?) Also, this kind of show can burn out really quick. But for now, it’s fun. Even if the character I identify with the most is Emerson, the only person in the cast who operates according to real-world logic and is driven insane because he’s in a world where logic doesn’t apply.