Pushing Daisies
Now that Doctor Who has restarted I wasn’t really looking for a new source of entertainment on the weekends; easily pleased as I am. I was looking forward to having a look at Pushing Daisies, what with all the media coverage it’s received recently, so I sat myself down with a glass of something and prepared to be objective.
More after the break.
It all starts with Ned, a young boy who sees his dog hit by a truck. Boo! As he strokes the dog with sadness, the dog gets back up again and lives. Yay! Later, his mother has a brain embolism and dies, but he reawakens her, only to find out that evening when she kisses him goodnight that if he touches her again she dies again. For good. Oh yeah, and when he reawakens someone, if its for more than a minute then someone else must die to take their place.
So, the girl next door, Charlotte ‘Chuck’ Charles, is Ned’s only love (and first kiss) but many years later when they’re all grown up and grown apart and Ned owns a pie shop, Chuck turns up dead in the ocean after being suffocated with a carrier bag with a smiley face on it. Ned and his business partner Emerson have been in the habit of waking murder victims, asking who killed them, touching them again so they die forever and collecting the reward money for solving the murder. So, when they find out Chuck has been murdered, they go to do the same thing. Except Ned loves her, and can’t put her back to death again, so lets her carry on living; at the expense of the funeral director. Probably the thing I loved the most about Pushing Daisies was Anna Friel. No more Brookside-lesbianism for her, she’s charming and witty and I love her. But not more than Donna Noble.
Everything about Pushing Daisies thus far is brilliant. The style is Tim Burton crossed with Desperate Housewives and a little bit of Six Feet Under, but it really does have a unique charm of its own. Obviously Ned and Chuck can’t touch, but are falling in love, and its painful but lovely to see. When they ‘kiss’ by kissing two china monkeys together I nearly cried, and when they hold their own hands and pretend they’re holding each other’s hand…well, I’m a sucker for a romance.
So, soppy as I am, I will continue to watch.