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“Name a canceled TV series that deserves to come back” is a fun game for those who like to reminisce about great shows that never got their due. In this current era of Hollywood, in which resurrecting long dead entertainment properties is clearly de rigueur, one beloved show is an especially apt answer to that question — Pushing Daisies, Bryan Fuller’s gone-too-soon masterpiece about literally bringing dead things back to life.
The prescience of Pushing Daisies’ hypothetical resurrection doesn’t stop there. The show, which first aired in 2007 and starred Lee Pace as Ned, a pie maker gifted with the power to bring dead plants, animals, and humans back to life with a simple tap, is also a fantastical exploration of intimacy between people who can’t touch each other upon pain of death. Ned’s power goes both ways, you see. His first touch resurrects the dead, but if he touches that same person a second time they are, in the parlance of the show, “dead again, forever.”
“Pushing Daisies” is a fantastical exploration of intimacy between people who can’t touch each other upon pain of death.
That second touch rule forms the crux of Pushing Daisies’ romantic plot, since the show kicks off with Ned discovering his childhood crush and first kiss Charlotte “Chuck” Charles (Anna Friel) has been murdered. Ned’s side gig is as a partner in crime-solving to a private detective, who uses Ned’s power to ask deceased homicide victims who killed them. When Ned touches Chuck, he decides to give her a second chance at life by leaving her alive at the cost of never being able to touch her again.
As the show progresses, Ned and Chuck find ways to express their love for each other in ways that don’t involve skin-to-skin contact. Ned purchases rooftop beehives so Chuck can pursue her passion for making honey, Chuck comes up with a system for hand-holding via proxy, and they eventually become comfortable kissing and hugging in full body suits or through sheets of plastic. In 2007 such workarounds were comical and sweet, but watching those same relationship extremes during the coronavirus pandemic in 2021 hits different.
Ned and Chuck’s distanced love story was set against a technically gorgeous and Emmy–nominated backdrop of colorful, Dr. Seussian whimsy and tongue-twisting dialogue. The fantasy of their magical relationship was the least fantastical element of Pushing Daisies, which took place in a world where alliterative character names like John Joseph Jacobs, Merle McQuoddy, and Billy Balsam populated towns filled with hexagonal honey shops and fields of retired windmills. Pushing Daisies’ kookiness is reminiscent of later hits like The Good Place and Netflix’s A Series of Unfortunate Events but remains stunningly original for a now-14-year-old show, so to see it brought back with the benefit of new technology is some of its fans’ dearest hope.
Pushing Daisies is one of many great shows that didn’t survive the 2007-2008 Writers Guild of America strike. Its second season order was cut from 22 episodes to nine, forcing Fuller to hastily attach an animated epilogue to that ninth episode that gave each character a modicum of closure. Its first season has 13 episodes, bringing the total number of Pushing Daisies stories to 22 short, beautiful installments.
As of February 2021 they’re all available to watch on HBO Max, so if whimsy, mystery, murder, and an oddly predictive romance sounds like something that might hit the spot, Pushing Daisies is a must watch. And who knows? Maybe the show will someday benefit from the magic resurrecting touch of Ned the pie maker. Or a cabal of studio executives who know what’s good for them. Whichever comes first.
Pushing Daisies Seasons 1 and 2 are streaming on HBO Max.