Pushing Daisies

I seem to spend more time whinging about the way reviewers are being treated by PR companies and the Studios they serve than actually reviewing stuff. I had hoped to maybe shame them into doing something about it, but sad to say, DVD Reviewers are a pretty long way down the food chain. Well, I've decided to give up crusading and in future I'm only going to review movies and tv shows I've bought myself because I want them. Messrs Beckett, McLean, Elliott, Wooldridge et al can wade through the dross.

Pushing Daisies was a series I was particularly looking forward to. I'd caught the first couple of episodes on ITV1 in its abbreviated screening pre-Euro 2008 and it looked wonderfully weird. You can appreciate my disappointment when the package that arrived from the PR people turned out to be a solitary DVD-R. Looking at the disc surface, I was doubly depressed as there looked to be only about an hour's worth of recorded material on the disc.

I put the disc in the machine and I was very pleasantly surprised - I'd been expecting content only and that being the first episode "Pie-lette" (Pilot - yuk yuk yuk). I got the Warner Home Video logo and the proper disc menu and the first three episodes of the show. The proper first three episodes including the show that was dropped from the running order so the show would finish before Euro 2008 wrecked the schedules. However, it does make me wonder - the finished product of the set comes on three proper discs, containing the nine episodes of the series made before the writers' strike, and if they're all filled to the same extent, they must be DVD-5s (like a DVD-R is technically). The whole run could have fitted on a single DVD-9 at that rate.

Pushing Daisies has got to be one of the oddest tv shows to come out of Hollywood in many a year. It was created by Bryan Fuller, who also created the tv show "Dead Like Me" (which Pushing Daisies was originally going to be spun off from). Fuller was instrumental in the development of "Wonderfalls", "Heroes" and wrote a number of scripts for "Star Trek: Voyager", which he also co-produced.

It is the story of Ned (Lee Pace), a man who discovers at an early age that he has an unusual power - to bring back the dead with a single touch. Unfortunately a second touch renders them dead again permanently, and unless he administers that second touch within a minute, then somebody else has to die in their place.

Tragically, Ned discovers his power when his mother is killed by a cerebral haemmorhage. Reviving her kills the father of his next door neighbour Charlotte (known as Chuck), who is sent to live with her strange aunts Lily and Vivian (Swoosie Kurtz and Ellen Greene). Ned grows up and finds he has a more useful talent making pies and sets up in business, his power having a side-effect that it de-rots overripe fruit.

Ned's gift is, of course, of limited use in everyday life apart from the fruit-rescuing thing, but it does provide him and his Private Investigator friend Emerson Cod (Chi McBride) with a sideline in reviving murder victims and finding out who killed them.

Then one day Emerson hears of a case of a young woman murdered on a cruise liner. It turns out to be Ned's childhood sweetheart Chuck (Anna Friel). Intending to find out who killed her, Ned and Emerson visit the funeral home prior to Chuck's interment and in the confusion of reviving her, the minute is exceeded and the funeral home's crooked proprietor carks it on the khasi.

Loath to return Chuck to the afterlife, Ned engineers her replacement in the coffin. They are together, but can never touch for even the briefest of moments.

The series is not your gritty, realistic piece by any stretch of the imagination. Colours are bright and cheerful, the people and surroundings a fantasy hyper-reality about as far removed from shows like CSI Miami as you can get. The show numbers among its dozens of executive producers both Bryan Fuller and Barry Sonnenfeld. The show has a very Sonnenfeld-esque feel to it - an almost fairytale air to the weird stories and strange characters, and a very stylised look to the show. A narration by Jim Dale adds to the underlying queasy quality. And the show does have a queasy side to it - it's all about murders, and not your quaint, Agatha Christie-style homicides. In the pielette episode, you see Chuck done away with by a black-clad goon wielding a plastic bag with a smiley face on it. It's quite jarring for a show that in its own weird Wednesday Addams style is sort of cute. Anna Friel, with her slightly dodgy American accent, is an adorable series heroine in spite of technically being undead.

The series was shot in HD 16:9, and although reproduced here in standard definition, the picture looks marvellous with highly-saturated colours. The picture is anamorphically enhanced for 16:9 tvs, with excellent DD5.1 sound. Subtitles for the hard of hearing, but otherwise no extras.