What to Binge This Weekend: 'Pushing Daisies' on CW Seed
Even before Hannibal met its untimely demise (maybe) this past summer, its mastermind Bryan Fuller had a history of creating shows that burned brightly, died too quickly, and left a tasty-looking corpse. Hannibal lasted three seasons, Wonderfalls managed one, and Mockingbird Lane never made even made it beyond the pilot stage. Falling somewhere in the middle is Pushing Daisies, the two-season cult favorite that did for pies what Hannibal did for advanced gastronomy. All 22 episodes, and every mouth-watering slice of flaky, fruit-filled pastry, is on display over at CW Seed, the network’s much-improved streaming service that satisfies your appetite for great mid-aughts TV like The O.C. and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.
Debuting to great acclaim and solid ratings in 2007, Daisies was, at heart, a procedural filtered through Fuller’s wonderfully cracked lens. The Barry Sonnenfeld-directed “Pie-lette” (FYI: That’s not a typo. We told you this show has pie on the brain. Dieters beware!) establishes a brightly colored world where ordinary people can have the slightest touch of magic.
People like pie-maker Ned, who possess the power to resurrect people — and produce — with a single finger. But there’s a catch: Should the person he touches breath the sweet air of life for more than one minute, someone else will take his or her place six feet under. And if he touches that revived person a second time, they’re gone for good. Ned learns these rules the hard way when, as a child, when he revives his mother, only to cause his friend and crush Charlotte (Anna Friel) to bury her father and move in with her kooky aunts (Swoosie Kurtz and Ellen Greene).
As an adult, Charlotte herself meets her maker, but Ned decides to bring her back and let her keep on living… even though that kills any possibility of romance, since skin-on-skin PDA is out of the question. At least she’s able to join him in his twin careers of pie-making and crime-solving, the latter of which he pursues with the help of private eye Emerson Cod (national treasure, Chi McBride).
Their routine is simple: They find a corpse, Ned wakes it up to answer questions of how it got to be a corpse, and then they use that intel to crack the case. And these aren’t routine murders of the week! Like the pies Ned bakes, each case has its own unique flavor, with ingredients like polygamy, bees, and department store window dressers stirred into the mix. Speaking of important ingredients, we can’t leave out the final member of the show’s perfectly blended ensemble — Broadway favorite Kristin Chenoweth as lovelorn waitress Olive Snook.
While acclaim followed Daisies throughout its run, the audience steadily dwindled as the first season came to an early close, a casualty of the Writers Guild strike. The numbers continued to free-fall in Season 2, forcing Ned to bake his last pie in June 2009. But Fuller has continued to fuel hopes that Daisies could return in some shape or form. A comic book was initially proposed, but was felled by the demise of its original publisher. And in 2013, Fuller dropped the “K” word… as in Kickstarter. For now, though, Seed is the best place to visit for pie-related crime-solving.
Pushing Daisies is available to stream on CW Seed.
