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2007-2008 Season Post-Mortem Part 8: "Pushing Daisies" |
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Thursday, 05 June 2008 |
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By John Keegan
Visit Critical Myth for an archive of John's TV Review archives, with more than 1100 entries.
| This season, I’ll be summing up this unusual 2007-2008 season with a post-mortem on the majority of the shows I’ve reviewed during the year, ranking from the very worst to the very best. In some cases, the term “post-mortem” is all too applicable. This is Part 8 of this 11-step journey, focusing on the first season of “Pushing Daisies”.
A number of new genre shows struggled out of the gate and eventually paid the price with cancellation. The writers’ strike only seemed to exacerbate the effects of an initial critical blow: “Bionic Woman”, “Moonlight”, and “Journeyman” were all immediately fighting a negative impression and subsequent internal challenges to fix them. Two other new shows (“Pushing Daisies” and “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles”) began with highly praised pilots and managed to maintain a similar level of excellence, letting the promise of the strong start to gloss over first season jitters.
“Pushing Daisies” topped the charts with its pilot, beating out every other season premiere. The visual style was completely different than anything else on the air, the comic timing was perfection, and it introduced a whimsically dark world that couldn’t be found anywhere else on television. It was, quite simply, something original, especially considering that it was airing on a traditional network.
It doesn’t hurt that Barry Sonnenfeld graced the direction of the first couple episodes, or that “Dead Like Me” and “Wonderfalls” veteran Bryan Fuller ran the writing room. The cast was equally capable, with solid chemistry, and the scoring matched the visual palette. As I said in the review for the pilot, “It’s as if Tim Burton and Joss Whedon had a love child.” And I meant that in the most complementary sense.
Unfortunately, while the writers did give the first season a nice enough arc, the writers’ strike cut it down to a mere nine episodes. It was basically making the case for a second season at that point, and thankfully, the network agreed with the notion. It should be interesting to see what kind of absurdity might emerge with a full season’s worth of brainstorming.
There is some cause for concern, however. While the series began on an incredibly high note, the pressures of producing a new opus each and every week were already taking their toll during the first season. The comedy wasn’t quite so sharp, the plots sometimes failed to measure up, and some of the more experimental elements fell short. The ratings were also slowly but surely wavering by the end of the short first season run, as the freshness wore off and some viewers fled to less challenging fare.
So the question on many minds regarding “Pushing Daisies” is simply this: will the second season be able to live up to the potential of the first season? After all, despite some minor shortcomings, the Critical Myth average rating for the first season was an impressive 7.8, ranking it among the best of recent years. It will certainly be a hard act to follow, especially when absurdist comedy is so very subjective. If any show has the pedigree to pull it off, however, it must be “Pushing Daisies”.
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