Blu-Ray/TV Series Review: Pushing Daisies: The Complete First and Second Seasons

 

Pushing Daisies was a series created by Bryan Fuller, who has a track record of developing shows that are critical successes with small but rabid fanbases (like Wonderfalls before this and Hannibal after this). The series stars Lee Pace as Ned "the piemaker" who owns a bakery called the pie hole. He has the ability to bring a dead thing back to life by touching it, with a couple of caveats. First, if he touches the dead thing a second time, it stays dead forever. If he does not touch the thing a second time within a minute, then something of similar "life value" in the vicinity will die to maintain a balance. So, if he lets a person live, another person within the vicinity will die in that person's stead. These caveats are important in a couple of respects. First, Ned works with a private investigator named Emmerson Cod (played by Chi McBride) who uses Ned's ability to solve mysterious murders by bringing the victims back to life long enough to ask them about their deaths. Second, in the first episode, Ned makes the choice to let his murdered Ned's childhood sweetheart, Charlotte (Chuck) Charles, played by Anna Friel live. This, of course, has major consequences that last throughout the series, one major consequence being that Ned and Chuck cannot touch each other as they inevitably fall in love. Also, Chuck's aunts, played wonderfully by Ellen Greene and Swoosie Kurtz, are traumatized by believing their niece to be dead.

This set just has the individual seasons packed together in one set. It is not a special complete series that was packaged separately. As for extras, the first season box claims there is a featurette titled Pie Time that features interviews with the cast and crew, but that is not actually on any of the discs in my set, which indicates it may be an imported set. The season 2 set does have a handful of featurettes including an interview with Bryan Fuller, a featurette on the music of the series, a feature on the production of the episodes, and one of the visual effects. Good for what is there, but not a ton of material. The A/V quality is good, but the show was made at a time in which the CGI special effects could still look kind of fakey and corny, and that definitely does come through in HD for some of the scenes.

Overall, the show is great. It is well-written and very well-acted. Kristin Chenoweth who plays Olive Snook, a waitress at the pie shop who is in love with Ned steals pretty much every scene she is in, and the series has a great set of recurring and guest stars including Stephen Root, Joel Mchale, Raúl Esparza, George Hamilton, Rachel Harris, Paul Reubens, Orlando Jones, and Ivana Miličević (among others). The second season was mostly finished before the official cancelation came through, so the series finale was tweaked a bit to give the show an ending that kind of tied things up. But, there was more than one storyline that was set up to play out in season three that just got abandoned because of the show's cancellation. So, if you have not seen the show before and really get into it, it will definitely feel incomplete, even though the second season does not end on a major cliffhanger because not everything gets tied up by the end. That said, it is still a great show, so if you like procedural crime shows that are a mix of drama and dark comedy, this is definitely a good one to check out.