PUSHING DAISIES - THE COMPLETE FIRST SEASON (2007)

Pushing Daisies - The Complete First Season (2007)

Actors: Lee Pace, Anna Friel, Chi McBride, Jim Dale, Ellen Greene
Format: AC-3, Box set, Color, Dolby, DVD-Video, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
Language: English (Dolby Digital 5.1), Portuguese (Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround)
Subtitles: English, Spanish
Region: 1 (U.S. and Canada only)
Aspect Ratio: 1.77:1
Number of discs: 3
Studio: Warner Home Video
DVD Release Date: September 16, 2008
Run Time: 379 minutes

Movie: * * * ½
Disc: * * *

This 2007-2008 American television series is quirky, clever, off-beat and wholly original. It should therefore come as no surprise that it only lasted two seasons!

This season one box set contains all nine episodes that make up the first season, yet another short season thanks to the recent writer’s strike. (The second season comprises 13 episodes),

The show can be best described as Amelie (you know, the cutesy 2001 French flick with the girl with the bulging eyes) retold by Douglas Adams. Set in a brightly-colored, over-stylized Edward Scissorhands-like fantasy reality, Pushing Daisies tells of a young man who can reanimate the dead by merely touching them. This “gift” comes at a price though: if he doesn’t touch the same person again within a minute’s time, that person will stay alive but someone else somewhere else will die – sort of the universe making up for the imbalance. What to do with such a gift? Well, become a pie-maker of course . . .

Actually the young man in question becomes part of a private detective agency in his part-time. What better way to solve murders than bringing the dead briefly back to life to interrogate them? Despite its macabre subject matter Pushing Daisies is however a sweet comedy in which characters even break out in song now and then! It is the sort of movie that Tim Burton would make if he was a stand-up comedian, or if every single episode of Buffy was like Once More, with Feeling.

WORTH IT? Some will no doubt find its sentiment too cloying, but chances are that they will however be won over by the show’s sheer cleverness and originality. Others will find it too “weird” and for them there is no hope: Pushing Daisies was not meant for them, but they’ll be missing out on a genuinely funny show that has future “cult” written all over it.

RECOMMENDATION: Like most sweet concoctions Pushing Daisies should be ingested in moderate portions. Unlike cliff-hanger shows such as Lost or Battlestar Galactica it isn’t the sort of series that you watch from beginning to end in a few marathon sittings. Best to intersperse it with whatever other viewing you may have planned.