‘Pushing Daisies’ is the perfect show to rewatch during quarantine
Looking for a quirky, colorful comedy series that combines romance, private investigating, and visually delightful pie making and eating sequences? Take a peek at Pushing Daisies to fulfill all these needs and watch a show that relates to love in the time of quarantine and social distancing.
Pushing Daisies is a fantasy mystery comedy-drama series that portrays the magical gift bestowed to Ned (Lee Pace), a humble pie maker. What is the magical gift? Ned can bring dead things back to life. With his gift Ned talks to murder victims in order to gather clues for their cases and along the way finds the girl of his dreams. The only hitch is: she’s dead.
The gift that keeps on giving
Ned’s magical gift, besides his ability to bake stunning pies, is that any dead thing he touches comes back to life but if they live longer than a minute the natural order must be set right and another person (in the near vicinity) will drop dead. If Ned touches the revived individual again they die permanently. No take-backsies.
The first experience Ned has with his gift is when he brings his dog Digby back from the dead after Digby is hit by a car. Of course, the awful reality is that Ned can never touch Digby again. Ned gets around this obstacle by constructing petting machines for Digby and only approaching his canine friend with gloved hands.
When Ned meets Chuck (Anna Friel), his long-lost childhood sweetheart, it’s at her funeral. Ned touches Chuck to gather the details of who might have killed her but when it comes time to tap her again and send her six feet under, Ned can’t bring himself to do it. Instead, he invites her into his life knowing that he’ll never be able to touch her again.
An odd couple
Chuck is an inquisitive, adventurous type, far-removed from the cautious character of her pie-maker boyfriend. She realizes that there can be no physical intimacy between her and Ned, not even a casual hand squeeze as any contact would mean a death sentence for her.
To maneuver around their unusual arrangement Chuck gets creative. Their first kiss happens when the two are stuffed inside clear body bags, the plastic shielding Chuck from Ned’s touch. Chuck uses the idea by holding up a portion of plastic-wrap anytime she wants to plant one on the pie-maker.
Other loopholes allow Ned and Chuck small moments of intimacy. They press two monkey statuettes together as surrogates for a kiss. They slow dance in each other’s arms wearing beekeeping suits. One moment of tenderness shows the couple with their hands clasped behind their backs, each pretending they are holding the other’s hand.
The magic of the show is not only the miraculous dead-raising or even the narration by Jim Dale, the golden-toned Harry Potter audiobook narrator, it’s the small, simple ways Ned and Chuck are able to connect with each other. Today, touch is taboo and almost as hazardous as Ned and Chuck’s predicament. The couple’s whimsical love in Pushing Daisies is a bit of comforting optimism that a new normal can blossom out of the gloom.
For romance and pies, look for Pushing Daisies episodes on CW Seed.
