Was Pushing Daisies Ahead of the Curve?

By Eva Hamm on August 15, 2013

Just about everyone is familiar with Bryan Fuller’s newest television show Hannibal, a series documenting the life of the serial killer Hannibal Lecter before the beginning of the movie The Silence of the Lambs. The dark, gory drama has become a hit amongst viewers who tune in every week to be chilled to the bone. Before Hannibal, however, Fuller had a different show about death, one that was considerably more light-hearted: Pushing Daisies.

Pushing Daisies follows the life of a pie maker named Ned (played by Lee Pace) who can wake the dead by touching them. If he keeps them alive for longer than a minute, however, someone else has to die in their place. He works with a private investigator named Emerson Cod (Chi McBride) to solve murders by touching the victims and asking them whodunit.

Anyone who discovers Fuller’s work through Hannibal would expect Pushing Daisies to be similarly dark, given the large focus on death; however, Pushing Daisies is actually a quirky, witty comedy set in a beautifully colorful world with a style reminiscent of the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s. With dialogue full of dry wit and hilarious puns, and a brilliant cast that includes Broadway star Kristin Chenoweth and actress Anna Friel, it seems like the show should be a massive hit. So why isn’t it?

Pushing Daisies first aired in 2007 and ran for two seasons before being canceled in 2009. It is fairly obscure—the only reason I even heard of it is through Bryan Fuller’s and Lee Pace’s rapidly growing fanbases on the blog-based social network Tumblr. Fans of Hannibal and The Hobbit (in which Pace plays the elf king Thranduil) have started to bring Pushing Daisies back to the attention of the public. It is gaining a fair amount of its own fans on the site, despite the fact that the show hasn’t produced any new material in four years.

Why would this show that barely interested audiences in 2009 suddenly be much more popular in 2013? The answer may lie in the recent obsession with the zombie apocalypse. Society has had a sudden upsurge in interest in the supernatural, largely fueled by the advent of the book series Twilight. But the focus has shifted off of vampires and werewolves and has settled for the moment on zombies.  Everywhere we go we see it—from shows like The Walking Dead to book adaptations like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies to marathons where participants dress up as zombies and chase other participants through the streets. Especially interesting is the new film Warm Bodies, which is a romantic comedy about a zombie that falls in love with a regular human.

Stylistically, the writing for Warm Bodies is not so different from that of Pushing Daisies. So this begs the question: Was Pushing Daisies too cutting-edge for the time? Was Fuller simply way ahead of the curve by being so blasé about death? That seems to be the case. Today, we don’t blink twice at shows that show death in a jokey way because they are becoming much more commonplace. Back in 2007, however, such things were not as common, which may have alienated audiences from realizing the true creativity they were receiving. They simply weren’t ready for it.

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