Spoilers!
USA Today has an article about Pushing Daisies with a pretty spoilery image.
BURBANK, Calif. - Pushing Daisies may be easier to watch than it is to describe.
In a medium that thrives on the cut-and-dried, the new ABC fall series is part romantic fantasy, part comedy and partly a whimsical take on crime-solving.
And it concerns itself with death, or rather, undeath: Its hero, Ned - a pie-shop owner who can bring the dead back to life with a touch of his finger - helps a detective solve murder cases by interviewing the victims. One of them, it turns out, is his childhood sweetheart, but their love must remain unrequited. If he kisses or even touches her again, she'll die for good.
"I always feel so stupid, like I'm not doing the show justice, when you try to say, 'I play Ned, who can touch dead people and bring them back to life, but if I touch them a second time, then they die. And if I keep them alive for more than a minute, then someone else will die,' " says star Lee Pace. "It makes it sound like CSI with a twist. It's a really tricky one to describe."
So ABC would just as soon not bother.
"Certain people are going to tap into the procedural (murder story) and love that, other people are going to get swept away in the romance, some people will like the magical realism elements or the comedy of it, and hopefully some people will love it all," ABC Entertainment chief Stephen McPherson says.
Due Wednesdays at 8 ET/PT starting Oct. 3, this ABC comic drama is a visually stunning fairy tale - colorful, life-affirming and dripping with cinematic flourishes, courtesy of creator Bryan Fuller and director Barry Sonnenfeld (Men in Black). In a new season full of more shows about cops, lawyers and sexy doctors, Daisies is a genre-busting standout, already embraced by many critics as the best of the freshman crop, but labeled by just as many as a hard sell.
Marketing the show to viewers is "definitely a challenge," says the network's promo chief, Mike Benson, "but for us, it's really about selling the magical romance of the show. We're really trying to sell an overall feeling rather than trying to make them understand exactly what it's about."
But pushing Daisies is a top priority for ABC, which is using the show to kick-start an all-new Wednesday lineup, where it will be followed by Private Practice, the Grey's Anatomy spinoff. On Thursday, ABC held a public screening of the pilot episode at the Hollywood Forever cemetery, and it has arranged for florists to push some daisies of their own.
Ironing out on-set wrinkles
There are some first-day hiccups as the show begins production on a hot day late last month on the Warner Bros. lot. "Who's going to be adorable?" Sonnenfeld coos to Pace and British actress Anna Friel, who plays Chuck, but he warns, "Guys, be very aware of not touching each other or getting even close."
They're filming a scene at the Pie Hole, with its pastry-crust roof and cherry light fixtures, rolling dough for a three-berry as a golden retriever who plays Ned's dog, Digby, naps off-camera nearby. After multiple takes, the dough is getting thin and sticky, requiring more flour. Finally nailing the scene, Pace and Friel return to their dressing-room trailers outside, where Friel plans to wash her powdery hands.
The water has been turned off, so she asks an assistant to restore it. Problem is, Pace's faucet has been left open next door, so his trailer begins flooding. Meanwhile, co-star Kristin Chenoweth's SUV has been covered in toilet paper by her admirer and former employer, West Wing producer Aaron Sorkin.
"He told me it's a tradition dating back to silent-movie times, that boys who are sweet on girls toilet-paper their cars," she says. (Her publicist Friday declined comment on the status of their on-again, off-again relationship.)
Chenoweth, who plays Ned's jealous waitress Olive, says she turned down a role in Broadway's Young Frankenstein for the series.
She says she knew Daisies "had its own special voice, and I thought, it's either really going to take off or not at all. There's not going to be an in-between, in my opinion. It is bizarre, in a wonderful way, and Bryan Fuller walks that line between genius and crazy, and I mean that in a complimentary way."
Fuller, 38, would probably welcome it. A self-professed Star Trek nut from rural Washington state, his love of the sci-fi series led him to become a TV writer. Freelance scripts for Deep Space Nine led to a job on Star Trek: Voyager and then to his first original work, Dead Like Me, a Showtime series about undead grim reapers.
He left to develop Wonderfalls, a Fox drama about a girl in a Niagara Falls gift shop who converses with collectibles. With no more than a small cult following, the show was canceled after four weeks.
He spent last year writing for NBC's Heroes while writing the Daisies pilot, inspired by an unused story line for Dead Like Me and by his love of Amélie, a 2001 French film starring Audrey Tautou as an eccentric do-gooder.
Having worked with Pace on Wonderfalls, Fuller wrote Daisies with Pace in mind, and he calls the actor "adorable, violently charming and intensely likable, and I wanted Ned to be this likable guy."
For his part, Pace describes Fuller's writing style as "totally unique. It's morbid in a way, but it's also really uplifting, good-hearted."
Friel believes there's room for uplifting TV in a lineup full of flawed heroes. "People can get fed up with coming home and having to go out of their own depressed life and into another depressed, cynical, stressful existence, which is a lot of what television offers now."
It's Chuck who sets the positive vibes in motion. Yet her return threatens Olive's tenuous claim on Ned. (Olive has one advantage in that she can actually kiss him, while Chuck must be content with contact through a beekeeper suit, plastic wrap and a body bag.)
But Chuck also threatens Detective Emerson Cod's (Chi McBride) gravy train by urging Ned to use his powers to help others, not just to collect reward money. "Chuck's re-emerging in his life has opened his eyes to other things he hasn't thought about in years, like compassion and what people want in their lives, how precious and fragile life is and how lucky we are to have every day we have," says McBride. "And Emerson's idea of that is, 'She's in my way. I don't like it.' "
Fuller says he'd envisioned a love story without the detective work, but ABC insisted on it.
"I worry about having a show that has no week-to-week engine, that would just be about that love affair or just be about his power," McPherson says. This way, "people can come in not knowing anything about the show and just enjoy the mystery of the week."
The show requires a careful balancing act: Its originality is a virtue, and yet the show can't seem too precious. It already has been likened to a Tim Burton film, with its oddball touches, a comparison that annoys the similarly eccentric Sonnenfeld, who sits astride a saddle, directed the Addams Family films and shot Raising Arizona.
Yet Fuller admits that to some viewers, "quirky is a dirty word," informing ABC's careful efforts to position the show with just the right measure of whimsy and romance.
McPherson echoes the show's own optimism. "American audiences of late have really proved they will embrace originality - they crave it," he says, noting similar, and ultimately unfounded, concerns about Lost and Ugly Betty.
In plotting a visual style, "I thought it should all be like turning the pages of a storybook," says Sonnenfeld, from the narration by British actor Jim Dale (best known for his Harry Potter audiobooks) to the use of bright candy colors. "If you've got an HD television, you're going to feel like you want to go up and lick the screen," says McBride.
But "there's a very narrow tone of success in Pushing Daisies," Sonnenfeld says. "It could become too much of a cartoon, or you can have (actors) be too flat." Instead, he has encouraged them to play the show's frequently absurd situations straight-faced, experiencing them as viewers do.
Then there's the tricky part of managing high expectations in a new season short on standouts, though early lavish praise "can't put any more pressure on me than I'm already putting on myself," says Fuller.
His special interest in death stems partly from "not having grown up out of a phase of my teenage years," when his taste turned to vampires. "I really don't think the concept of death is as dark and horrible as it's often made out to be," he says, "because, really, it allows you to look back on a life that's been lived and cherish the golden moments."
But there's one golden moment Chuck and Ned can't have. "They're never, ever, ever going to have sex - they just can't," says Pace.
Won't that frustrate viewers, who can't even bother obsessing over the will-they-or-won't-they question? "When people say that, I think of Moonlighting, and that's why everyone watched it all the time," says Friel. "You'd go, 'Get together! Get together!' And they never did, so you watched the next week to see if they would."
Besides, she says, "it's a nice way to end the whole thing: Sleeping Beauty, the wrong way around."
source
BURBANK, Calif. - Pushing Daisies may be easier to watch than it is to describe.
In a medium that thrives on the cut-and-dried, the new ABC fall series is part romantic fantasy, part comedy and partly a whimsical take on crime-solving.
And it concerns itself with death, or rather, undeath: Its hero, Ned - a pie-shop owner who can bring the dead back to life with a touch of his finger - helps a detective solve murder cases by interviewing the victims. One of them, it turns out, is his childhood sweetheart, but their love must remain unrequited. If he kisses or even touches her again, she'll die for good.
"I always feel so stupid, like I'm not doing the show justice, when you try to say, 'I play Ned, who can touch dead people and bring them back to life, but if I touch them a second time, then they die. And if I keep them alive for more than a minute, then someone else will die,' " says star Lee Pace. "It makes it sound like CSI with a twist. It's a really tricky one to describe."
So ABC would just as soon not bother.
"Certain people are going to tap into the procedural (murder story) and love that, other people are going to get swept away in the romance, some people will like the magical realism elements or the comedy of it, and hopefully some people will love it all," ABC Entertainment chief Stephen McPherson says.
Due Wednesdays at 8 ET/PT starting Oct. 3, this ABC comic drama is a visually stunning fairy tale - colorful, life-affirming and dripping with cinematic flourishes, courtesy of creator Bryan Fuller and director Barry Sonnenfeld (Men in Black). In a new season full of more shows about cops, lawyers and sexy doctors, Daisies is a genre-busting standout, already embraced by many critics as the best of the freshman crop, but labeled by just as many as a hard sell.
Marketing the show to viewers is "definitely a challenge," says the network's promo chief, Mike Benson, "but for us, it's really about selling the magical romance of the show. We're really trying to sell an overall feeling rather than trying to make them understand exactly what it's about."
But pushing Daisies is a top priority for ABC, which is using the show to kick-start an all-new Wednesday lineup, where it will be followed by Private Practice, the Grey's Anatomy spinoff. On Thursday, ABC held a public screening of the pilot episode at the Hollywood Forever cemetery, and it has arranged for florists to push some daisies of their own.
Ironing out on-set wrinkles
There are some first-day hiccups as the show begins production on a hot day late last month on the Warner Bros. lot. "Who's going to be adorable?" Sonnenfeld coos to Pace and British actress Anna Friel, who plays Chuck, but he warns, "Guys, be very aware of not touching each other or getting even close."
They're filming a scene at the Pie Hole, with its pastry-crust roof and cherry light fixtures, rolling dough for a three-berry as a golden retriever who plays Ned's dog, Digby, naps off-camera nearby. After multiple takes, the dough is getting thin and sticky, requiring more flour. Finally nailing the scene, Pace and Friel return to their dressing-room trailers outside, where Friel plans to wash her powdery hands.
The water has been turned off, so she asks an assistant to restore it. Problem is, Pace's faucet has been left open next door, so his trailer begins flooding. Meanwhile, co-star Kristin Chenoweth's SUV has been covered in toilet paper by her admirer and former employer, West Wing producer Aaron Sorkin.
"He told me it's a tradition dating back to silent-movie times, that boys who are sweet on girls toilet-paper their cars," she says. (Her publicist Friday declined comment on the status of their on-again, off-again relationship.)
Chenoweth, who plays Ned's jealous waitress Olive, says she turned down a role in Broadway's Young Frankenstein for the series.
She says she knew Daisies "had its own special voice, and I thought, it's either really going to take off or not at all. There's not going to be an in-between, in my opinion. It is bizarre, in a wonderful way, and Bryan Fuller walks that line between genius and crazy, and I mean that in a complimentary way."
Fuller, 38, would probably welcome it. A self-professed Star Trek nut from rural Washington state, his love of the sci-fi series led him to become a TV writer. Freelance scripts for Deep Space Nine led to a job on Star Trek: Voyager and then to his first original work, Dead Like Me, a Showtime series about undead grim reapers.
He left to develop Wonderfalls, a Fox drama about a girl in a Niagara Falls gift shop who converses with collectibles. With no more than a small cult following, the show was canceled after four weeks.
He spent last year writing for NBC's Heroes while writing the Daisies pilot, inspired by an unused story line for Dead Like Me and by his love of Amélie, a 2001 French film starring Audrey Tautou as an eccentric do-gooder.
Having worked with Pace on Wonderfalls, Fuller wrote Daisies with Pace in mind, and he calls the actor "adorable, violently charming and intensely likable, and I wanted Ned to be this likable guy."
For his part, Pace describes Fuller's writing style as "totally unique. It's morbid in a way, but it's also really uplifting, good-hearted."
Friel believes there's room for uplifting TV in a lineup full of flawed heroes. "People can get fed up with coming home and having to go out of their own depressed life and into another depressed, cynical, stressful existence, which is a lot of what television offers now."
It's Chuck who sets the positive vibes in motion. Yet her return threatens Olive's tenuous claim on Ned. (Olive has one advantage in that she can actually kiss him, while Chuck must be content with contact through a beekeeper suit, plastic wrap and a body bag.)
But Chuck also threatens Detective Emerson Cod's (Chi McBride) gravy train by urging Ned to use his powers to help others, not just to collect reward money. "Chuck's re-emerging in his life has opened his eyes to other things he hasn't thought about in years, like compassion and what people want in their lives, how precious and fragile life is and how lucky we are to have every day we have," says McBride. "And Emerson's idea of that is, 'She's in my way. I don't like it.' "
Fuller says he'd envisioned a love story without the detective work, but ABC insisted on it.
"I worry about having a show that has no week-to-week engine, that would just be about that love affair or just be about his power," McPherson says. This way, "people can come in not knowing anything about the show and just enjoy the mystery of the week."
The show requires a careful balancing act: Its originality is a virtue, and yet the show can't seem too precious. It already has been likened to a Tim Burton film, with its oddball touches, a comparison that annoys the similarly eccentric Sonnenfeld, who sits astride a saddle, directed the Addams Family films and shot Raising Arizona.
Yet Fuller admits that to some viewers, "quirky is a dirty word," informing ABC's careful efforts to position the show with just the right measure of whimsy and romance.
McPherson echoes the show's own optimism. "American audiences of late have really proved they will embrace originality - they crave it," he says, noting similar, and ultimately unfounded, concerns about Lost and Ugly Betty.
In plotting a visual style, "I thought it should all be like turning the pages of a storybook," says Sonnenfeld, from the narration by British actor Jim Dale (best known for his Harry Potter audiobooks) to the use of bright candy colors. "If you've got an HD television, you're going to feel like you want to go up and lick the screen," says McBride.
But "there's a very narrow tone of success in Pushing Daisies," Sonnenfeld says. "It could become too much of a cartoon, or you can have (actors) be too flat." Instead, he has encouraged them to play the show's frequently absurd situations straight-faced, experiencing them as viewers do.
Then there's the tricky part of managing high expectations in a new season short on standouts, though early lavish praise "can't put any more pressure on me than I'm already putting on myself," says Fuller.
His special interest in death stems partly from "not having grown up out of a phase of my teenage years," when his taste turned to vampires. "I really don't think the concept of death is as dark and horrible as it's often made out to be," he says, "because, really, it allows you to look back on a life that's been lived and cherish the golden moments."
But there's one golden moment Chuck and Ned can't have. "They're never, ever, ever going to have sex - they just can't," says Pace.
Won't that frustrate viewers, who can't even bother obsessing over the will-they-or-won't-they question? "When people say that, I think of Moonlighting, and that's why everyone watched it all the time," says Friel. "You'd go, 'Get together! Get together!' And they never did, so you watched the next week to see if they would."
Besides, she says, "it's a nice way to end the whole thing: Sleeping Beauty, the wrong way around."
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