Camellia Peebles
At this moment, the critic was old enough to know better, plus 32 weeks, one day, two hours and 28 minutes old, and she was pressing play on a show about a man who can raise the dead with a touch but cannot touch the woman he loves. This is how Pushing Daisies narrates everything, in precise increments, down to the minute, as though the exact measurement of a life were a whimsical thing rather than the most frightening thing there is. Jim Dale, the voice British audiences know from decades of stage work and American listeners know from reading the entire Harry Potter series aloud, tells you exactly how old everyone is at every turn, and it takes a while to understand that the counting is the point. This is a candy-colored comedy about death, and the narrator is always, gently, keeping track of how much time everyone has left.
The facts are these, to borrow the phrase the show reaches for whenever it is about to explain itself: Ned (Lee Pace) is a pie maker who discovered as a child that his touch brings the dead back to life. A second touch returns them to death, permanently. And if he lets something stay alive longer than a minute, the universe balances the ledger by killing something else nearby of “equal value.” He learned all of this the worst way a child could: he revived his dead mother, and a minute later the balance took the life of the man next door, who happened to be the father of the girl he loved, and when his mother kissed him goodnight, his second touch killed her again. So the premise is not really about a magic finger. It is about a man whose love is lethal, who spends his life building careful distances between himself and everyone he cares for, and who then meets his childhood sweetheart, Chuck (Anna Friel) freshly murdered, and cannot help himself. He brings her back. And now they are together, and in love, and can never touch, because the first brush of skin would kill her for good.
You could stage this as tragedy, and underneath it is one, but Pushing Daisies makes the audacious choice to stage it as a living pop-up book. Everything is saturated, heightened, diorama-bright, a world that looks illustrated rather than filmed. The sets and costumes do not decorate the tone; they are the tone. The city morgue is striped like a candy cane. Even the corpses are pretty. Barry Sonnenfeld’s visual direction swoops and match-cuts through this dollhouse with real formal wit, transitions folding one scene into the next the way a children’s book turns its pages, and the effect is that death is everywhere in this show and rendered, at every turn, as something bright and safe and sweet to look at. It is the whimsy that makes the grief bearable, and it is the grief that keeps the whimsy from being empty. The show holds both in the same candy-colored hand.
It helps to think of Pushing Daisies as film noir’s sunnier, better-looking twin. It keeps the entire noir skeleton, the private eye, the murders, the case of the week, the omniscient voiceover threading it all together, and then inverts every tonal choice the genre ever made. Where noir is shadow, this is saturation. Where noir is cynicism, this is sincerity. Where the noir detective narrates his contempt in a rain-slicked drawl, Jim Dale narrates enchantment in a storybook lilt. The private investigator here, Emerson Cod (Chi McBride), is a hardboiled cynic in it for the reward money who also knits to calm himself down, and that contradiction is the whole show in one character. Pushing Daisies is what noir would look like if it believed in love. It has all the same bones and none of the same despair.
At the center of it is a hero the culture has almost entirely stopped making. Ned is a genuinely, almost aggressively good man, boyish and devoted and sincere, the sort of gee-whiz sweetheart who would walk you to class and ask you to the dance and mean every second of it. We do not really romanticize that man anymore. The current appetite runs to the mafia prince, the bad boy, the beautiful monster you can fix, the morally gray love interest with a body count. And here is Pushing Daisies, a 2007 relic of a gentler romantic imagination, offering a devoted pie maker whose niceness is not a mask over anything darker, whose gift may be macabre but whose heart is exactly what it appears to be. Watching it now is almost like visiting a lost dialect of romance, the one where sincerity was swoon-worthy, and there is something quietly moving about how out of fashion Ned has become.
The romance itself is staged as a permanent near-death. Ned and Chuck spend every scene inches apart, and the tension is never whether they will kiss but whether they can survive being that close, because one accidental bump, one reflexive reach, and she is gone forever. So they improvise. Chuck holds up a sheet of plastic wrap and kisses him through it. Ned builds a full-body suit for reasons the show lets you imagine. They hold hands in gloves, they invent contraption after contraption, and every one of these devices is both a barrier and a bridge, a monument to the ache at the show’s center. The most romantic thing this man can do for the woman he loves is not touch her. Their love is measured entirely in the distance they maintain to keep it alive.
And the ache radiates outward from Ned’s gift in every direction. Olive Snook (Kristin Chenoweth,) the waitress who loves Ned with a completeness he cannot return, is the show’s purest vessel of longing, and the cruelest thing about her situation is that she is not only denied Ned but denied the truth, kept outside the secret of Chuck’s revival, pushed away and pulled back in as the group’s need for her fluctuates. She invents her own explanation for why Ned and Chuck never touch, deciding Chuck must be allergic to him, which is both funny and unbearably sad, a person locked out of the magic reaching for the most mundane version of it. The show knows it mistreats her. The characters say so out loud, that they pushed her away and it was their fault, that they had to because of what Ned can do. Everyone in this show loves someone they cannot fully have, and Olive gets no plastic wrap, no clever contraption, only a soft deflection on a cliff’s edge when she finally admits that Ned has never looked at her the way he looks at Chuck. He tells her that is not necessarily true. It is not love. It is a kindness shaped like a maybe, and it lights her up anyway.
By its second season the show has grown genuinely intricate, trading some of its clean case-of-the-week rhythm for serialized, soapy entanglement that mostly orbits the buried figure of Chuck’s father. Chuck, aching with her own grief, uses Ned to revive her dad, who now lives in bandages, unable to show his face, a masked guardian hovering near the daughter he can never openly claim, which is the isolation-by-magic curse extended one more generation. A con man works one of Chuck’s shut-in aunts to dig up the grave over a pocket watch that then changes hands three times. A trio of deadpan Norwegian detectives arrives as a funhouse mirror of our own trio, badges and all, and takes the cases Emerson is too personally compromised to touch. It is a lot of plot, and it is here, in the second season, that the show’s commitment to whimsy occasionally tips into too much of a good thing. The dialogue runs at a fast, arch, over-written clip that Gilmore Girls fans will recognize, every character quipping in complete paragraphs, and the metaphors pile so high that now and then you want the show to simply breathe. It is not my usual taste, and I found that it works anyway, because the artificiality is the entire point of a show pitched as a living storybook. You learn to hear past a little of the preciousness because the thing underneath it is worth hearing.
If the show has a real flaw, it is that it sometimes bends its own best rule. The life-for-a-life balance is Ned’s gift at its most interesting, a genuine tragic cost, and the pilot honors it by having the balance claim an innocent stranger when Ned chooses to keep Chuck alive. But the show is tempted, more than once, to turn that same rule into a convenient rescue, so that when a villain has the leads at gunpoint the ledger equalizes at exactly the right moment and the bad man dies so the good ones can live. The mechanic that is supposed to make Ned’s power dangerous occasionally becomes the thing that saves him, and each time it does, the show cheats a little of its own weight. It is the one place the fairy tale lets itself off the hook.
But these are the complaints of someone who loves the thing she is complaining about, which is the only honest position to review Pushing Daisies from. It is gorgeous and strange and genuinely sad under all the sugar, a show that turns rotten fruit into pie and makes you crave the pie, that turns death into a candy-colored diorama and somehow makes the sweetness deepen the grief rather than cancel it. It will make you want pie every single time. It cast Broadway singers and Little Shop of Horrors veterans and the man who read Harry Potter to a generation, and it pointed all of that theatrical warmth at the oldest, saddest fairy-tale question there is, which is what you do when the thing you love most is the one thing you can never touch. At this moment, having finished, the critic was older than when she started, by exactly the length of the show, and quite a bit more tender for it. The facts, in the end, are these: Pushing Daisies is a story about counting the time you have with the people you cannot hold. It just tells that story in the brightest possible colors, and hopes you will not mind that it hurts.
And so the critic, apparently not old enough to know better after all, set off in search of pie, nursing the particular hope—foolish, storybook, entirely her own—that she might yet stumble over a devoted man in an apron, and that his touch, unlike everyone else’s, would be the safe kind.
