By D. W. O'Dell
I’m a contrarian by nature. When everyone says go left, I say, “Let’s consider going right.” If everyone around me is nodding in agreement, I have to raise my hand and ask a question. If all the fans of Pushing Daisies hurl invectives at ABC for canceling the show, I feel compelled to leap to their - ABC's - defense.
Pushing Daises was (note the past tense) one of the most visually and intellectually stimulating shows ever to appear on a major network. The premise was not even remotely a rubber stamp police procedural - although the characters did spend as much time in the morgue as those in your average CSI episode - and the execution was nothing short of spectacular. Throw in an astonishing cast that nailed the material and a whimsical, fairytale storyline, and you’ve got the making of a runaway hit, right?
Of course not. Are you kidding? Pushing Daisies was designed to appeal to a small niche audience that wanted something unlike the rest of the fare on network television. It’s a conundrum: fans of the show love it because it doesn’t appeal to the lowest common denominator audience, but then are surprised when the ratings aren’t high enough to sustain the show indefinitely.
Did ABC make mistakes in presenting the show? Sure. Probably no show returning from the writer’s strike needed to remind its audience of what it was about more thanPushing Daisies, yet ABC ran no repeats over the summer or early fall, not even on ABC Family cable (the show’s continuing storyline would have made an all-day marathon a natural on the cable channel). At the least, the release of the season one DVDs, which nearly coincided with the season two premier, should have been scheduled earlier to give people a chance to view the previous episodes before starting season two...and if ABC had no control over the DVD release date they should have at least pushed back the season two premier by a week.
I can’t recall any show getting 12 Emmy nominations, winning three, receiving less hype from its network than Pushing Daisies did.
Still, the fact that a major network commissioned 22 episodes of such a quirky, offbeat and expensive show is nothing short of amazing. Even the recognition by the Emmy people is surprising, given that the show never garnered stellar ratings and fell into that oddball category, the 60-minute “comedy” with no laugh track. I was particularly appreciative of the best actor nomination for Lee Pace, as usually the Emmy nominees in the comedy category are for the funniest people, not necessarily the best actors, as evidenced by the fact that Michael Richards won three Emmys for Seinfeld and Jason Alexander got zilch. Pace was the straight man on Pushing Daisies, yet his deft handling of plot twists that no actor ever could possibly have prepared for (how does one react to the reanimated corpse of your childhood sweetheart?) anchored the show’s airy premise to something remotely resembling reality.
You could spend years arguing over which supporting actress was most robbed of an Emmy - Ellen Greene, Swoozie Kurtz or Kristin Chenoweth. All three were exquisite. Any “normal” show would have made Chenowith’s Olive Snook a jealous, bitter rival of Ned’s childhood crush, Chuck, but Chenoweth imbued the character with such warmth that frankly I think the most fantastical element of the show was that Ned wasn’t in love with Olive before Chuck arrived. Her musical numbers soared, her sparring with Ned’s partner, Emerson Cod, showed spunk (the diminutive Chenoweth and the voluminous Chi McBride were as physically unlike as any two actors could be, the making of terrific comedic chemistry), and her friendship with her rival for Ned’s affections created a far more complicated relationship that usually depicted on network television.
Which brings me back to the bottom line - it is network television. It has to appeal to a mass audience to pay the bills. I repeat - the fact that ABC commissioned over 20 episodes of a show about a guy who raises the dead for 60 seconds then kills them again is nothing less than a miracle of the highest magnitude. In the entire history of network television, I believe only Lost has been able to retain a mass audience while engaging in storytelling that is, both literally and descriptively, fantastic.
So thanks to you, ABC executives, for giving Pushing Daisies the green light and producing essentially a season’s worth of episodes. I’ll be thinking of you when I am watching my Pushing Daisies DVDs instead of watching crap like Dancing With the Stars or Homeland Security U.S.A. (I may be a contrarion, but I do have standards).
