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Show:		9.0
Picture:		10.0
Sound:		10.0
Extras:		8.0
Score:		9.0

Director(s):	Adam Kane • Lawrence Trilling • Peter O'Fallon • Peter Lauer
Writer(s):	Bryan Fuller, Gretchen J. Berg, Aaron Harberts, Peter Ocko
Starring:	Anna Friel • Chi McBride • Lee Pace • Kristin Chenoweth • Swoosie Kurtz • Ellen Greene • Jim Dale
Genre:	Comedy • Drama • Television
Release Date:	July 21, 2009

List Price:	Blu-ray - $34.99
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Dead Like Me was one of the best programs Showtime never wanted to lose. Wonderfalls was one of the best programs Fox never knew it had. Pushing Daisies was one of the best programs ABC never knew it had. The shows in question may not be the same, but their creator is: Bryan Fuller. At the heart of Fuller’s work there’s a morbid sense of humor that fully blooms in Dead Like Me and Pushing Daisies while running in the undertones of Wonderfalls. The creator of the aptly named Living Dead Guy Productions has been on a roll with each series, bringing fresh new takes on well-worn mediums. Dead Like Me followed the life-after-death story of a girl named George whose new job was to reap the souls of a living before they died. Wonderfalls was a sitcom where a girl talked to animal-shaped objects – and they talked back; often with cryptic clues telling her of a kind action she should perform. And then we have Pushing Daisies – the best of the lot to date: a pie-maker named Ned (Lee Pace) discovers he has the unlikely ability to bring people back from the dead with the mere touch of his finger – but not without consequences.

What’s unfortunate about all these shows is that they require the past tense when speaking of their statuses. Dead Like Me died because of issues amongst the cast, but the most recent two have been axed by studios in spite of critical raves and decent ratings. Pushing Daisies seemed to hold the most promise of all with clever storytelling, an impeccably chosen cast and creatively vibrant set pieces. The first season achieved the perfect television hat trick: it set up its own premise brilliantly and without being too expositional; it provided a weekly formula and yet never worried about straying away from it; and it was consistently interesting with some of the best writing on network television.

Yet it was canceled.

‘Well, the second season must not have retained the zest that made the first so interesting,’ the uninitiated might think – but that’s just not the case. For everything right Pushing Daisies did in the first season, the second capitalized on it and made it better – drew more from it in ways that were at once unexpected and yet in hindsight you couldn’t see it going any other way. Pushing Daisies might be Bryan Fuller’s television opus.

Thanks to the WGA strike, season two of Pushing Daisies had no season finale cliffhanger to wrap up and thus dove right in to the quirky goodness of the series. However, many of the storylines of the first season do receive a tie-off at the second season’s end as it had become somewhat apparent that this season would be the last. Emerson Cod (Chi McBride) has been using Ned’s gift quite lucratively only to find his method of bringing victims back to life and then solving their cases thrown in to a snag when family gets involved – on all sides. On one hand, Vivian (Ellen Greene) and Lily (Swoosie Kurtz), the aunts of Chuck (Anna Friel) become divided as Lily’s maternal mystery and Vivian’s romantic ruminations throw obstacles in their path. Olive Snook (Kristin Chenoweth), the sole co-conspiratorial comrade of Lily’s latent lovechild, secludes herself in a cloister to keep from divulging the dirt she’s dug up. The familial fiasco only gets worse as Vivian’s ventures with an ex-friend of Chuck’s dearly departed father returns for a possession from the grave – only to find the corpse of Charles Charles has departed once again. Emerson’s investigative endeavors

The intrigue of Pushing Daisies doesn’t come from just one aspect of the show’s brilliance. The alliterative characterization and use of the all-too-familiar gumshoe trope would doom so many other shows – but not this one. Superb acting and writing keep the ship afloat when the show’s plotting seems to get too weighted with character and not enough single-serving episodic stories. The Ned-Chuck-Olive triangle provides countless moments of fast-talking nuanced dialogue which often gets cut in half by the no-nonsense “why me” sensibility of Emerson. The chemistry is fantastic and the stories some of the best you could find on television in the last few years.

You wouldn’t think a comedic drama would warrant purchase on Blu-ray, but Pushing Daisies is so stunningly stylized and colorful that every fan should try to experience it in high definition. The colors are crisp and gorgeous and the detail so refined. The audio gets a nice boost with the show’s score getting proper justice. It may be tempting to purchase this on DVD, but once you’ve seen Pushing Daisies on Blu-ray there’s no going back.

Blu-ray Bonus Features

There are four quite entertaining featurettes to be found on the set. The first puts Bryan Fuller coroner’s table and picks through his mind for thoughts on the series and his creation process. Considering Fuller might be one of the most creative minds in the business at the moment, it’s really a cool featurette to witness. The remaining three pieces are production-oriented in nature with a look at how a script goes from the page to vividly colored screen, the work of series composer Jim Dooley and how some of the show’s special effects are created. The last of these I’m still quite unsure of because for the most part Pushing Daisies doesn’t really excel at the big special effects presentations (there are even times when the effects are somewhat bad) but there’s enough in the featurette to distract you from all that.