By Buzz Byrne
Ned (Lee Pace) is a pie maker who can bring dead things back to life with one touch. One touch more and the formerly dead thing becomes dead forever. Ned discovered this gift just before his mother died so he brought her back. If the “Alive Again” one stays alive longer than a minute, then something else must die. In his mother’s case, her staying alive takes the life of his childhood sweetheart, Chuck (she’s a girl named Chuck). Now as an adult he saves Chuck (Anna Friel) by making her alive again after she is murdered. He is in love and finds hope, but he can never touch her or she will die. Such is the premise for PUSHING DAISIES.
And Ned works with a private investigator (Chi McBride) solving murders by awakening the dead and asking who killed them.
The caper for the second episode is to find out who killed aeronautic engineer Bernard Slaybeck. He was working on the car of the future and was the apparent victim of a hit and run. When he is awoken by Ned, Chuck butts in and asks if he has any last requests. “Tell Janine from Promotions I always loved her.” When finally asked who hit him, he replies, “I wasn’t hit by a car. I was killed by a crash test dummy.” And time ran out and the team had to actually detect to solve the mystery.
The mystery is paper thin but this show built for style and fun and romance, not LAW & ORDER twists. The car of the future is the Dandy Lion SX. It runs on dandelions. Janine from Promotions calls it the “Spores Car of Tomorrow.” She wears a dandelion costume, post bloom, while she models the vehicle. As Chuck, Ned and Emerson Cod (PI and closet knitter) break in to Dandy Lion HQ, Chuck proves her worth and the narrator tells us, “Ned feels a mixture of happiness and trepidation.” Ned mutters, “Why is it always a mixture?”
Meanwhile, at Ned’s restaurant “The Pie Hole,” waitress Olive Snoop is mooning over Ned and suspicious of the new woman in his life. What else could come next but a song? A quick version of “Hopelessly Devoted to You.”
Meanwhile the detective team finds a room full of corpses, stirring memories of both COMA and SOYLENT GREEN. Emerson has the funny and revealing observation regarding the dangling dead, “If I wanted to be around geeks in leotards I would have stayed in Art school.” Janine leads the team a mass grave of crash test dummies but before they get there, her Dandy Lion blows up, leaving behind not much but her charred stimulant laxatives. Janine has issues.
Filled with disturbing images of Ned and Chuck that resemble a pornographic Target commercial, Olive goes for a walk and helps save them all from Janine’s fate. All is progressing: the stakes, the love triangle, the goofiness.
When DEAL OR NO DEAL is on three times a week, when there are three different CSI’s, what is so wrong about a silly irreverent take on love and death and TV detectives? This is a fun show and it should be watched but it will be cancelled soon. Unfortunately it just has that feel.