Prime time's 'Daisies' blooms anew on ABC
ABC's beautiful, whimsical "Pushing Daisies" returns this week with the feel of something that has been brought back to life, which is appropriate because it's about a person with just that ability, someone who can revive the dead with a touch.
It's an exotic conceit, I know, and it's not easily explained. Just where does a show go with such a character, and what exactly is it trying to say?
That gives this lovely series a fragile quality too. "Pushing Daisies" is the hothouse flower of prime-time TV, or perhaps, to use a metaphor more suitable to the season premiere, it's a bumblebee that has already released its sting and is now living on borrowed time.
What I do know is that "Pushing Daisies" has an enchanting, fairy-tale air about it, and it casts its spell anew when it returns for a second season at 7 p.m. Oct. 1 on WLS Channel 7.
"Daisies" stars Lee Pace as Ned, a humble "pie maker" with the mythical ability to revive the dead with a single touch. The only bugaboos are that if the thing remains alive for a minute, something else nearby must die in its place, and if he touches the thing again it's dead - this time for good.
As creator-director Barry Sonnenfeld's storybook opening explains, Ned discovered this ability as a child when he brought his mother back to life, but that in turned killed the father of his childhood sweetheart, Charlotte "Chuck" Charles. Later on, when both were grown - in the pilot episode, in fact - Chuck died on a cruise, but the body was returned home for burial and brought back to life as well by Ned, for which she was grateful enough to finally return his love for her - except, of course, that they could never touch again.
Their "ballet of avoidance," as the show calls it, would seem to be simply a new variation on the old romantic tease, but "Daisies" has somehow given it an endearing romantic quality, thanks in large part to Pace's patient contentment and Anna Friel's doe-eyed daffiness as the grown-up Chuck, even as she plans to move out on her own in the season premiere.
Even so, the notion of lovers who can never touch would be just too airy-fairy for TV if not for Chi McBride's Emerson Cod, the local private detective in the town of Coeur d'Coeur. He provides much of the show's weekly narrative drive, in that he's one of the few people in on Ned's talents and has convinced him to use them now and then for the powers of good - or at least for some handy-dandy (and profitable) crime solving. Ned typically touches the dead in the morgue, asks who killed them, then sends them off to Hades with a second touch. Emerson solves the crime and collects whatever rewards are available.
I have to admit, there isn't much to the crime-stopping angle in Wednesday's season premiere. A woman killed in a bee attack suggests it may have been no accident before having to die again - and releasing a new swarm of bees out of her open mouth. Chuck gets a job at the bee company the woman had been working at and, with Ned's help, susses out the true killer, just in time for the hour to end.
Yet "Daisies" can't be reduced to some "Law & Order"/"CSI" police procedural. Along the way, Sonnenfeld mixes in a vast array of honeycomb design motifs, washes the screens in yellows and other vivid primary colors and dwells on evocative images, as when Ned brings a dead beehive back to life simply by standing there and letting Chuck pour the dead carcasses over him.
For all its charms, including Kristin Chenoweth's Olive Snook, who is driven into a convent over her unrequited love for Ned, "Daisies" has proved to be a little too nebulous and difficult to explain to become an instant hit, especially as followed by the callow "Private Practice" and the tawdry "Dirty Sexy Money" on the ABC schedule.
Yet it was just amassing an audience when the writers strike interrupted its flow last winter. ABC could have either brought it back on the quick or canceled it, but instead it renewed the show and gave Sonnenfeld and the writing staff the summer to reconsider and nurture their delicate creation.
What I like most about the season premiere - in addition to its style and beauty - is it doesn't overreach. Again like a fine fairy tale, it seems content to spin a yarn in an arresting way and let the meaning come later. It turns out that even your Curmudgeonly Old Neighborhood TV Critic can't resist turning the TV every Wednesday night and humbly requesting: "Tell me a story."