Pushing Daisies 1x01 Review: Three Plum à la Mode

“Pie-Lette”
Written by Bryan Fuller
Directed by Barry Sonnenfeld
 
The Story
A pie-maker named Ned has the ability to bring dead things back to life by touching them. A minute later, unless he touches them again, something else dies instead. After the second touch, that’s it. When he was a kid, he discovered this ability when he touched his dog Digby after a semi truck ran over him, and he sprang back to life. Next, his mom dropped dead of a brain aneurism, so he touched her back to life too. He didn’t know about the life-for-a-life deal, so a minute later, the father of his crush, Charlotte “Chuck” Charles dropped dead in his mom’s place. Then, when his mom kissed him goodnight, she died again, permanently. Ned and Chuck kissed at their respective parents’ funerals, and then never saw each other again because Ned’s dad whisked him off to boarding school. As an adult, along with baking pies, Ned works with a P.I., Emerson Cod, who knows his secret. Ned helps Emerson solve murders by touching murder victims back to life, asking them who killed them, and touching them again before a minute’s up. It’s very effective. They exonerate a beloved Chow using this strategy. The next murder to solve, alas, is Chuck’s. Ned touches her cheek to bring her to life, and then can’t bring himself to touch her dead again, so the shady thieving funeral director dies in her place. Emerson isn’t happy about this (mostly because he could’ve been the one to die instead). Chuck and Ned catch up a bit; their childhood crush surges right back, and it’s very cute. Chuck helps Ned and Emerson learn more about how she died so that they can all split the reward money. They go to her aunts’ house, because the killer is likely to go there soon to retrieve the contraband Chuck was unwittingly transporting when she was killed. The killer tries to murder Aunt Lily and then Ned, but he didn’t do a good job with Lily, so she kills him instead. All is well, no one but Ned and Emerson know Chuck is alive again, and Lily and Vivian are beginning to recover from their agoraphobia and other issues. However, Olive, Ned’s pie waitress, is probably going to be disappointed in her feelings for Ned.
 
Pushing Daisies is a very fun, very strange show. I’ve seen it criticized for its supposedly dismissive approach to death, particularly with the reactions of murder victims to their one minute of being alive again, but I kind of love how whimsical death is. It feels kinda like British humor, actually. I think the film noir elements of the show might be what gave me my love of that genre and detective fiction in general, because I’m not sure I’d encountered much of that before I watched it. There’s just so much to love here.
 
Things I Liked

• Everything Jim Dale says as narrator
• Everything Emerson says, and all of his facial expressions
• Everything about the show's aesthetic, from the music to the bright colors to the redundant place names to the pie crust roof on the Pie Hole to the fact that Olive’s pajamas are the same as the wallpaper. It’s like a morbid fairytale with noir elements.
  
• PIE
• “The funeral director, always eager to supplement his income, was happy to allow the deceased an audience.”
• The way the camera zooms on Ned after he opens Chuck’s coffin
• Ned’s adorable awkwardness
• “Your eye is twitchin’.”
• Lily and Vivian. Particularly their obsession with cheese.
• Chuck’s book collection
• Chuck’s dresses
• Chuck’s unabashed flirting with Ned, and Ned’s fumbly bashful reactions to it
• “When were you going to tell me?” “In the morning, or when it came up. Whichever didn’t come first.”
• Ned and Chuck putting their hands over the same spot across the wall
• “Oh, I intend to profit from your stupidity.”
• Emerson swatting Ned over the head with a newspaper
  
• Emerson’s face while hugging Chuck for Ned
  
• “It’s impolite to discuss a person’s menopause in mixed company.”
• “It does have a grassy flavor.”
• “I can hold my breath for a long time.”
• “In a rare moment of sensitivity, he reached out and touched her...not realizing she didn’t like being touched.”
• Chuck kicking her dead murderer
• The wry and skeptical yet monosyllabic coroner

 
Things I Didn’t

• Olive’s unsettling forwardness
• They filmed that bit with Lily not seeing Chuck wrong. You see around corners better with the eye opposite the corner in question, not the eye closest to the corner. They should’ve flipped the side of the room Chuck was on.
• Crap, you guys’d better be careful smashing those monkeys together! Your hands looked super close to touching!
  
• The hand-holdy thing at the end is really cheesy, and it makes me cringe every time I watch this episode.
  

 
The Characters
Ned is an awkward, neurotic mess, but in an extremely lovable way. I think it’s actually because of him that I realized awkwardness can sometimes be adorable. It’s hilarious how he sheepishly/matter-of-factly makes himself feel better about the funeral director’s death because the man was stealing and selling things from dead people.
 
Chuck puts up a front of being very witty and matter-of-fact about her death, but it clearly bothers her a lot more than she’s letting on. She just has this very determined optimism to her, so even if she’s deeply upset, she’s going to forge ahead and make the most of her new situation. It helps that her childhood sweetheart is there.
 
One of my favorite things about the show is that even though it has a very fairy tale feel to it, and Lily and Vivian are spinster aunts, they’re not evil. It’s sort of the stereotype that unmarried middle-aged or older ladies are somehow creepy, but Lily and Vivian are portrayed as sympathetic and very humerous even though they have a lot of problems. Lily is very cantankerous and cynical, while Vivian wants to be friendly and optimistic but can’t quite manage it with so many phobias. They’re wonderful characters.
 
Emerson is freaking hilarious. Grumpy, pragmatic, cynical, and with a very dry sense of humor. I love him. And this is before we know his favorite pastime is knitting! That all the characters have unexpected hobbies is really cool. Ned’s isn’t particularly unexpected because we’re introduced to him as the pie-maker, but his is making pies. Olive’s is riding horses. Chuck’s is keeping bees. Lily and Vivian’s are cheese and synchronized swimming. Emerson’s is knitting. This is how you give your characters charming quirks.
 
Overall Rating
5/5