ABC's fairy tale, funny guys and a comic flop

Lee Pace is a gifted pie maker with other surprising abilities as well in "Pushing Daisies."

"Cavemen": The 30-second commercial tries to stretch its one joke over a half-hour.

"Carpoolers": It has no right being as funny as it is.

ABC unveils three new shows in the next two days. One might be almost too good, one might be almost too bad and one surprises by being just about right.

On that note, I'll skip ahead to Wednesday and "Pushing Daisies," a gorgeous new series with a fairy-tale quality debuting at 7 p.m. on WLS Channel 7.

"Daisies" is directed by Barry Sonnenfeld, a filmmaker known for his sense of style, and it is absolutely the most beautiful labor of love on TV since Matt Groening was pouring his heart into "Futurama." His camera glides across sun-kissed landscapes beneath flawless blue skies and into the life of a character unlike anyone else in prime time.

Lee Pace's Ned is a pie maker with a gift, but as with Keri Russell's baker in the recent feature film "Waitress," it's a gift that is often a curse. Ned discovered as a boy he could bring dead things back to life with a single touch. But he discovered the hard way that another touch would reinstate death. Now he uses his skill to bring extra freshness to picked fruits going into his pies, but the dual nature of his talent has made him understandably hesitant about human contact. He has to fend off the advances of a waitress co-worker played by the all-but-irresistible Kristin Chenoweth, even as she insists, "We all need to be touched."

A private investigator played by Chi McBride -- finally in a series worthy of his own abilities -- discovers Ned's skill and sets him to work as something of a detective's Rumpelstiltskin. Ned brings the dead back to life, asks them who killed them, then touches them again, so he and the shamus can go off and claim any and all rewards for solving the crime.

They live happily ever after until one of the victims turns out to be his childhood sweetheart, Chuck, played by the perky Anna Friel. Ned brings her back to life and is just about to finish the job when he suddenly realizes, "What if you didn't have to be dead?"

"That'd be preferable," she replies in the deadpan tone that is this series' trademark.

So now the three of them set off to live happily ever after, but for one drawback: Ned and Chuck can never touch again.

This is a whimsical flight of fancy created by Bryan Fuller, who worked last year on "Heroes," but previously did the too-good-for-this-TV-world Fox series "Wonderfalls." And that's a concern for "Daisies" as well. The old romantic tease, involving a couple that can't be a couple, is a threadbare idea to rest such a gorgeous piece of work on. The "Daisies" pilot creates a lovely mood, but how long can they sustain it? A viewer gets the feeling that with a show this precious, one wrong touch and it will be gone. (Word is ABC and show producers have already clashed over Sonnenfeld's budget-busting direction.) For now, however, it's highly recommended.

At the other end of the quality spectrum is "Cavemen," debuting at 7 p.m. today on Channel 7. It's a comedy about the characters created for the Geico insurance ads, and to my way of thinking they were getting pretty hard to take in 30-second installments, much less 30 minutes. The pilot episode, using the title characters for something of a racial allegory, has been in the can since at least May, but ABC has tinkered with it endlessly, so that tonight's formal debut was not done in time to get screeners out to critics -- never a good sign.

"Cavemen" is going to have to evolve from its commercial origins in order to survive as a sitcom, but my bet is it will be extinct in a matter of weeks.

Which brings me to tonight's follow-up, "Carpoolers," premiering at 7:30 on Channel 7. The premise behind this comedy seems almost as unlikely to succeed: four disparate, desperate guys with nothing to connect them but their daily commute unite to generate yuks. Yet somehow it pulls off its slapstick, screwball humor, mainly thanks to Jerry O'Connell as the loutish Laird, with key support coming from T.J. Miller as another man's overgrown son, Marmaduke.

(If the name alone isn't funny enough for you, he also has a sneering curl of the lip that looks like a trained bear doing an Elvis imitation.) It doesn't hurt to have old "Murphy Brown" trouper Faith Ford around as Marmaduke's mother, either.

"Carpoolers" isn't great by any means, but it's surprisingly amusing. It's TV comfort food, the sitcom equivalent of oatmeal, and if that's a lukewarm endorsement at best, I think many viewers might find it just right.