Pushing Daisies

The facts were these:

Back in 2002, Bryan Fuller created a lovely little show called Dead Like Me. It was about death - about being dead and not being dead and, among other things, how that can be one of the best ways to understand this life we lead. It was a really lovely show, darkly witty, whimsical without being zany, characterful without being dreary. It ran for two series and then got canned.

In 2008, Bryan Fuller created a lovely little show called Pushing Daisies. It was about death, about grief and mourning, and how we can die while being alive because of secrets and promises we make in our head. It was not so much dark as blindingly colourful and luridly theatrical, thanks to Barry Sonnenfeld bringing over the same high-colour imagery he used in the Tick. And it wasn't so much whimsical as zany and gleefully so, and it could get away with it because it was light-hearted in every possible sense. That is to say, you can get away with a few plot holes if you work hard to create a sense of wonderment and spiritual levity.

Which is to say, Pushing Daisies is the kind of show that makes you believe the world is a fine place, and worth fighting for.

And that's not easy. It's a far-too-widely believed myth that sentiment and happiness are easy to create, but that's not true. They're lazier to create because you can rely more readily on cliche and on the audience's willingness to follow you to a happy ending. You can easily pretend the world is a better place, in general or because of the puppies, but to actually convince people is another matter.

I suppose I'm biased. I like television. It's my medium of choice to find meaning and happiness in the world. And I love mystery shows, particularly ones that are playful with genre tropes and don't take themselves too seriously, like the gorgeous Monk. And have the good sense to have a murderer-of-the-week every week, like the fantastic Monk. Boy, that was a good show. It wasn't a brainburner but it was gentle and crafted with love - for its audience and its characters. And real affection for characters, as opposed to just assuming you'll like them because they're gorgeous or witty or have mad skills, is terrifyingly absent from most writing these days.

Bryan also loves his characters in Pushing Daisies, and he loves their world. Unlike Monk, there is an evolving storyline centering around the hero Ned's magical ability to bring back the dead. He can do it for a minute, then touch them again to put them back. Any longer and something else has to die. The show then follows the ins-and-outs of such a gift (kind of like Buffy followed the highs and lows of being a Slayer) while never forgetting to have wacky mysteries for PI Emerson Cod to solve.

But really it's not just being a good murder-of-the-week show that makes Daisies so good. It's that it has a truly fundamental understanding of style. Style that is imbedded in every inch of the show. Every character has their own colour (not unusual, see Scrubs for another example that does that well) and also their own musical theme and design motifs. And this goes for minor characters as well, each infused with a musical and visual presence and of course delivered with very strong performances, always riding just on the edge of melodrama. The writers too, know how to ride the edge of formulaic but always keep their wheels on the edge of familiar, telegraphed structure, which is a different thing altogether. Every episode for example, is topped with a flashback to the childhood of one of the major characters. Every episode plays with themes, motifs and metaphors both large and small, mirroring subtlety (again, like in Buffy) the emotional drama of the characters in the narrative drama of the mystery. Like a perfectly produced stage performance everyone finds their marks, their themes, and their astonishing visual style, and lives it to the full, so that even if that role is just to be an obvious original suspect who will certainly be killed in Act Two, you see that expressed to its utmost. And like a classic 1930's serial, there's a narrator who knows more than the characters, and loves to tease you on.

And sometimes, if you're really lucky, they let Kristin Chenoweth sing.

Let's be clear: the four leads are powerhouses. Lee Pace sells nervous Ned without making him emo, Anne Friel keeps the soft and cuddly Chuck inches away from coddling and Chi McBride truly understands how to live large without being cliche and as a result may be the coolest private eye since Shaft. But then there's Kristin, as Olive Snook. Chenoweth was absolutely the best thing about the last two seasons of the West Wing, matching an old hand like John Spencer moment for moment, almost spinning herself off into her own little universe of spin-off, the Leo and Annabelle show. She does it agian in Daisies, with every moment she's on screen being pure delight and telling its own little story. Without her to add the zip, the story of lonely Ned and his extremely sappy alive-again childhood sweetheart would be as cloying as it sounds. With Olive - with THE Olive, dropped into the martini of television - it works. Yes, it's that kind of show - Olive is the Olive.

Of course, it might not have worked if said Olive hadn't been the amazing, the wonderful, the exquisite Kristin Chenoweth. But it was, and it did.

And then it lasted two excellent seasons and got canned.

In 2009, Fuller went back to try and tie up some of the loose ends and continue playing with the lovely characters he made in Dead Like Me. We can only pray that, in six years time, he does the same with Daisies. Until then, go and rent or buy this one post-haste.

And Kristin?

Marry me.