Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie's plot.

Over the past few years, I've found several television shows to get hooked on. One of the most engrossing is Bryan Fuller's Pushing Daisies, the fantastical ABC dramedy about a young man whose touch brings both life and death. The premise is quite unique. Ned (Lee Pace) first discovers his gift in childhood (Field Cate) when his dog Digby is hit by a car. His touch reanimates the dog; meanwhile, unseen by Ned, a squirrel drops dead. Later, he revives his mother after her sudden death. When his next-door neighbor - the father of his best friend Charlotte "Chuck" Charles (Sammi Hanratty) - drops dead, he begins to understand the dangerous nature of his gift, which betrays him again when his mother kisses him goodnight and dies again, never to be revived. First touch, life. Second touch, death. And for any being whose reanimation lasts more than a minute, some being of equal value must die in its place.

It sounds a little morbid, but somehow Pushing Daisies manages to be one of the most vibrant, joyful shows on television. It follows the adventures of Ned twenty years in the future, when he has opened an eye-catching pie shop as a way to keep his mother's memory alive. Fear of his own abilities and years of rejection from his father have made Ned extremely standoffish, albeit sweet and polite. He has a fairly uneventful existence with Digby, who, defying all expectations of dog behavior, has evaded Ned's touch for all this time, and the pie maker ignores the heavy-handed hints from his vivacious employee, Olive Snook (Kristin Chenoweth), that she is head over heels in love with him.

Life gets more complicated for Ned when a crusty, self-serving private investigator named Emerson Cod (Chi McBride) stumbles upon Ned's secret and, in exchange for his silence, proposes a partnership in which they solve murder cases by speaking with the victims themselves. One such investigation leads them to Chuck (Anna Friel), a naive, gentle beauty who never forgot the boy with whom she shared her first and only kiss before he was whisked off to boarding school by his stern father.

Once Ned brings his long-lost love back to life, he can't bear to touch her again, so he breaks his own rules and allows her to live, to the undoing of the corrupt funeral home director. Chuck and Ned are together again and giddily happy about it - but what kind of relationship can they have when they aren't ever able to touch each other? How they work around that barrier is part of the show's appeal. While so many prime time shows are oversexed, the chaste, innocent puppy love of Ned and Chuck has an irresistible sweetness to it.

Pushing Daisies is an unconventional love story. It's also a crime procedural, though much more fun than most of those tend to be. All of the colors and designs are outlandishly eye-popping, looking like something out of the flashbacks in Big Fish. The setting is modern-day, but askew from regular reality; there are all sorts of strange set pieces and situations that seem rooted in an earlier or entirely invented time, and most of the characters introduced each week are highly idiosyncratic. Adding significantly to the fairy tale feeling is narrator Jim Dale, whose audiobook readings of the Harry Potter books have been widely acclaimed. He narrates in a literary style reminiscent of Lemony Snicket, and his observations are both ruminative and amusing. One of my favorite examples comes in an early episode at a moment in which Ned's dog licks the face of a weeping Olive: "Olive considered how much she loved Digby for paying attention to her when the pie maker would not, and Digby considered how much he loved salt..."

Olive is probably the most over-the-top of the characters, prone to wearing especially colorful duds and bursting suddenly into song. While I generally sympathize with characters stuck in unrequited love, her personality is so forceful that at first I found her abrasive. As the show wore on, however, I grew to love Olive, especially once she develops a relationship with Chuck's reclusive aunts, aggressive, one-eyed Lily (Swoosie Kurtz) and kind, timid Vivian (Ellen Greene). Both have sunk into a deep depression following Chuck's death, and in-the-dark Olive, who concludes that Chuck faked her own death, can't understand how she can be so cruel as to continue to let them think she's deceased. The way Olive, Ned and, from behind the scenes, Chuck minister to these women is touching and culminates in an exuberant revival of a different kind for both sisters, particularly Vivian, whose joyous rendition of Morning Has Broken is one of my favorite scenes in this first season.

Each of the major characters has appealing personality traits. Ned and Chuck are an almost impossibly considerate couple, and Ned's bumbling demeanor makes him especially adorable. Olive has undeniable zing, and Emerson is grumpy and cynical in an Oscar the Grouch kind of way. In some ways he's the most entertaining character of all, since he's always tossing out exasperated one-liners and bringing a little balance to the usually sunny dispositions of his cohorts. As the show reveals more about him, such as his passion for knitting and a dark family secret that fuels his investigative drive, he becomes increasingly fascinating.

There are many reasons I love this show, which unfortunately got out of its groove thanks to the writers' strike and now may be in danger of cancellation. I'd hate for that to happen. It's one of the freshest, funniest, most romantic and creative shows on television. It's even inspired me to become an occasional pie maker myself. If you don't mind a little Tim Burton-style weirdness, Pushing Daisies is an outstanding show. The first season was much too short at a mere nine episodes; I sincerely hope the second season isn't its last.

This review is an entry in the Happy 80h Birthday, Mickey! write-off.

Recommended: Yes

Viewing Format: DVD