Dead, Alive, Dead Again

Pushing Daisies arrives like a dream you don’t want to leave—candy-colored and melancholy and genuinely strange, built around a piemaker who can bring the dead back to life with a touch but can never touch them a second time without taking that life back permanently. It’s a love story conducted entirely through almost-contact, two people kept apart by the one thing they most want.

The visual DNA sits somewhere between Big Fish and Amélie—that deliberately oversaturated, slightly artificial world where everything is too beautiful to be real, which is precisely the point. Bryan Fuller’s shows always run a little hot, and here it works on every register: too much color, too much wit, too much sadness folded carefully inside the comedy. It reminded me that television can be a place where something actually strange and tender and formally weird gets made, at least briefly.

It got cancelled after two seasons. Of course it did. Things this particular rarely survive long enough to conclude properly. What’s there still holds.