Pushing Daisies

I don't watch a lot of TV. Or at least not consistantly. We record My Name is Earl, Mythbusters and two out of three CSI's (original and extra-cheese Miami flavor.) There are one or two other random shows I'll watch if I happen to catch them when they're on but for the most part I don't "follow" any one TV show anymore. I watched Lost during the first season but by season two I was so stressed out from the insanity of it all I just had to give up. It went from being quirky to needing a pen and notepad to keep up with it all. It's just not fun.

So a few weeks ago my mom mentions this show she thinks I'd really like - not just for what she's read about the story itself but also because it's supposedly to be very visually different. I love when my mom tells me about something because it "looks like you, Stacie." She's pretty much always on the ball with that one - from the Nick Bantock address book to Pushing Daisies. My mom's cool like that.

I decided that I'd go ahead and record an episode of Pushing Daisies and see if it was worth it. I'd missed the first week so our first recorded episode was number two. I swear, I was five minutes into it and I totally went back on my resignation to never get tangled up in a continuing storyline again. Everything about this show appeals to me - visually, it's very stylized with the characters interacting in a pretty modern way and the dialogue isn't dated. But between the costumes (especially those worn by the female characters), the cars, the architecture and serious color saturation of it all you can't pin the time period down to any one decade. It's like they took the coolest elements of the last sixty years and mixed it all together. There's a narrator who moves the story along, the main character is referred to as "the pie-maker", and the main setting is his pie shop which is appropriately (and awesomely) named "The Pie Hole." It's all very art deco-meets-nifty 50's-meets-mod. I have to say, I really like it.

Then there's the storyline itself. I can't even begin to explain it (and it made no sense to me until I watched it play out) so you can click here and get a quick explanation: http://abc.go.com/primetime/pushingdaisies/index?pn=about It sounds pretty complicated but it's really not. And there are a few little twists that are achingly sweet like the fact that Ned couldn't catch Chuck when she fell and could only watch helplessly or that Olive can get outside of her own feelings and care about Chuck's grieving aunts (oh my hell, Swoozie Kurtz in the eye patch kills me.) Plus the lunacy of it all - a one winged carrier pigeon gets a new wing by way of a taxidermied parrot donor and a "Bedazzle" machine (seriously) or the explanation and flashback of the Asian guy's family civil war history.

So after the first week I kept feeling like there was something somewhat familiar about the show even though I only recognized a few of the main actors (Swoozie Kurtz, Kristin Chenoweth.) I realized it was something about the flow of the story or the dialogue. Or the totally casual and hysterical way it the show deals with death without being morbid at all. Then I read that it was created by the guy who also came up with Dead Like Me which was one of the funniest and most unique shows I every watched. Nail number two in the coffin of me not getting sucked in. But the final blow came on this last episode.

There is a scene where Olive is trying to get Chuck's aunts to leave their house where they've been confining themselves since Chuck's death. Olive makes a comment about the one-winged pigeon flying away instead of going back into the cage she used to transport it to the aunts' house. She says maybe the aunts could put their grief inside a birdhouse, an imaginary birdhouse. In their soul. And then they'd be able to venture outside their house again. I turned to Rusty and said, "I adore this show. They just referenced a 'They Might Be Giants' song. Without being super cheesy." Then the show comes back from commercial, and? The aunt played by Swoozie Kurtz is driving a 1940's looking car while Olive and the other aunt are in the back seat singing...



And then? I think maybe I swooned a little. And sang along.