Pushing Daisies: A Four-Sentence TV Review

Maybe it makes me feel like a smarter pop culture consumer, or maybe I just yearn for something different among much of the like-minded entertainment we're served these days, but I tend to have a soft spot for movies and TV shows (and books, even) that are near-impossible to sum up in one sentence, and Pushing Daisies most certainly fits in that category.

Okay, it's the show about the guy who can bring people back from the dead with one touch and happens to use that talent to solve murders on the side, which helps supplement his pie shop, but that's kind of a run-on sentence, and if you've been reading these Four Sentence Reviews for a while, you know I don't often favor such comma-filled, punctuation-exploiting, word-bloated rambles.

I'm not sure there's ever been a television show so infused with whimsy, romance, and pathos, featuring an utterly charming lead character who's encountered so much tragedy in his life that it compels him to shut himself off from many of the emotional comforts we all crave, and whose supernatural talent pays the bills, but also happens to keep him from experiencing the only true happiness he's ever really wanted.  Not everyone will like Pushing Daisies (I can think of some friends who might not care for it), and its quirky, goofy, sweet, surrealist tone (which is very reminiscent of the movie Amelie, if you saw that) will either be loved or hated by viewers, but if the rest of the series lives up to the pilot episode that premiered last Wednesday, this is a show that deserves to be appreciated for daring to be different and challenging the limits of programming that television can give us.