Bryan Fuller

Speaking of showrunners, I’ve made a point in the past about the tendency of shows to fill out their staffs with writers who usually create their own shows, who spend time working for someone else until they can get another new show off the ground. This helps a production company because they get more for their money (by putting their contracted writers to work between projects) but can also be a sign of a show that has too many cooks, since some of the writers are arguably more qualified to run the show than their boss.

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.