ABC has a reason to smile and that’s because this fall, it’s going to be Pushing Daisies.  The executive that introduced the panel summed it up best – it’s a forensic fairy tale.  Brought to you by the creative mind behind Wonderfalls and Dead Like Me, the show follows Ned who realizes at a young age there’s something different about him.  That difference: Ned can return the dead to the living with a single touch.  The universal caveat: If Ned doesn’t touch them again and end their short return to life, someone in close proximity will take their place in the land of the dead.  When he does place that second touch, death is then final. 

PLOT:

Young Ned has a huge crush on the girl-next-door Charlotte “Chuck” Charles.  Unfortunately, when Ned saves his mother, it costs Chuck her father.  Almost twenty years later, Ned finds his simple life making pies (at The Pie Hole, no less), becomes complicated when a Private Investigator named Emerson learns his secret.  The two become partners with Ned asking the newly living who killed them and then splitting the reward with Emerson.  The feisty waitress at The Pie Hole who wants to get closer than Ned can allow rounds out his existence.  His life is relatively simple until he learns that a woman was murdered on a cruise… and her name is Chuck.  Ned brings her back, but doesn’t have the heart to let the girl he loves die.  Ned now has to live his life with love and death just a forbidden touch away.

CAST:

Lee Pace (The Good Shepherd, Wonderfalls) plays the likeable and strange Ned.  A favorite actor of mine Chi McBride (Boston Public, The Nine) plays his business associate Emerson.  Anna Friel (Goal!, Timeline) is the lovely, quirky, newly living Chuck.  Kristin Chenoweth (Wicked, The West Wing) is Olive, the waitress who wants more from Ned. Swoosie Kurtz (Huff, The Rules of Attraction) and Ellen Greene (Little Shop of Horrors) bring Chuck’s guardian aunts Lily and Vivian to hilarious life.  Jim Dale helps it all make sense with a knowing narration.

THE LOOK:

Barry Sonnenfeld (Men in Black, RV) has given this fairy tale show a great and stylized fairy tale look.  The colors really pop off the screen, or as he said, “we went to LaserPacific and turned the color dial to eleven.”  To keep the show consistent, Mr. Sonnenfeld will direct three of the first crop of episodes.

THE ETC.:

I learned from Chi McBride that The Nine will return to air the remaining episodes starting August 1^st.

If this show seems a bit familiar to fans of Bryan Fuller’s work, it was his original idea on what to do with Dead Like Me’s second season before he moved on to Wonderfalls.  Fans of these shows will find a new favorite in Pushing Daisies.

The cast’s rapport was clearly visible on the stage.  Chi McBride, as it so happens, does a phenomenal Barry Sonnenfeld impersonation.  When asked how the two will overcome their inability to touch on screen and asked if they were acting “method” in this, Lee Pace and Anna Friel engaged in a pretty convincing kiss.  Kristin Chenoweth gave her fans a bit of a show when she returned a compliment with a posed glimpse of her cleavage.  This just seems like a fun group of people and the feeling translates to the screen.

THE CONCLUSION:

The Pilot was introduced by a man from Variety who said, “The pickings are a little small this season.”  Thankfully, I will be satisfied just to add Pushing Daisies to my regular viewing list and I recommend you do the same.