I remember when the greatest praise you could heap on a programme, particularly an American import, was that it was “dark”. Twin Peaks was dark, American Gothic darker, and - until Dexter came slashing along - Six Feet Under darkest. Even Desperate Housewives, before it turned irremediably silly, was applauded for being a black comedy, narrated from beyond the grave. If, as a programme-maker, you wanted kudos, it would be best you thought David Lynch not Walt Disney.
But, what is this? Pushing Daisies, an American fantasy that goes all out to be a sunny delight? Could light be the new dark? Michael Grade, high commander at ITV, thinks so. Noting the success of cheerful shows such as Kingdom and Britain's Got Talent, he sees house prices falling and viewers demanding escapism. This, presumably, is why he has scheduled Pushing Daisies for ITV1 at prime time on Saturday nights, the first time an American drama has done such heavy hauling for ITV since, I imagine, Columbo.
Bryan Fuller, the creator of Pushing Daisies, said somewhere that he was greatly influenced by the French film Amélie in developing his series, which was an unexpected hit in the US in the autumn. He doesn't seem to realise that for quite a few people, "infected" might be more to the point than "influenced", that particular brand of fairy-tale archness not being to everyone's taste. As it happens, I don't count myself as an out and out Amélie-hater, but even if you absolutely adored Jean-Pierre Jeunet's film, you may not be in the clear with Fuller's extended whimsy about a man who can bring the dead back to life. Pushing Daisies makes Amélie look like Ingmar Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage.
Ned discovered his special gift when he was just nine years old, after his dog, Digby, got sideswiped by a truck and Ned was able to bring him back to life with a single touch. When Ned's mom keeled over with an aneurysm, just as she was popping a cherry pie into the oven, he revived her immediately, only to discover that there were two catches to his talent. If the revived person lived for more than a minute, someone else nearby had to die, and if Ned touched them again, the magic was permanently reversed, something Ned found out when his mom leaned over to kiss him good night, instantly turned blue and repeated her fatal pratfall.
If you're worried about the thought of a nine-year-old coping with his mother's sudden death, then don't be. Death here is treated, even by the recently dead, as more of diverting curiosity than a tragedy, and not something to be attended by anything even remotely resembling sorrow. The characters who die do so with a cartoon suddenness, and, by and large, are treated as disposable. The closest you're going to come to the unappeasable yearning of grief is Ned's amorous passion for Chuck, the childhood sweetheart he restored to life and must ever after leave untouched. Chuck is played by Anna Friel, the latest British actress to take a leading role in a US drama. I can't really tell how good the accent is, but she looks lovely. Someone told me the other day that 95% of straight men are in love with Anna Friel. And that's a fact. And the other 5% are clinically insane. So Ned is in love with Chuck (he's one of the 95%), but he can't touch her or she'll drop down dead. Imagine it! Bummer.
Pushing Daisies has a Tim Burton look about it - all super-stylised, bright colours, kinda trippy. It looks like a paint commercial, has that Amélie kookiness, Terry Pratchett fantasy, and death - death's big this year. Our own Jim Dale narrates: he's big over there too, he reads the Harry Potter books. The script tears along at a hundred miles an hour, full of puns and witticisms. Olive (it doesn't matter who Olive is) desperately attempts to connect to someone disconnected. Chuck lies in the dark, considering how she came to be lying in the dark. Dying's as good an excuse as any to start living. There's a shop called the Boutique Travel Travel Boutique.
Yet, where Pushing Daisies badly needs a heart, it has art direction instead: a welter of Fisher-Price colours and whimsical inventions, such as Ned's pie shop, with its crimped-crust roof, or Chuck's guardian aunts, Vivian and Lily, a retired synchronised-swimming duo who share "matching personality disorders and a love of fine cheese". That combination of symmetry and arbitrary quirkiness is also true of the direction, which frames scene after scene as a camp tableau in which pattern-making matters far more than content. This is a drama in which even the murderer uses pink plastic bags with smiley faces on them to asphyxiate his victims, so that the corpses end up beaming perkily at their own demise. It is also a drama (and you might want to have a waterproof bag at hand before you read this) in which a hug is described as "a Heimlich manoeuvre to help you cough up a wad of fear and anxiety".
You can get some idea of the thing's almost pathological candy-coated escapism from an exchange between Ned and his sidekick, Cod, a private detective who uses Ned's gift to solve murder cases. "Been watching the news lately?" Cod asked (at a time, as it happens, when Iraq was going from bad to worse and the credit crunch was just beginning to bite)."Yeah, but there doesn't seem like much going on in the world besides a dead girl on a boat," replied Ned.
Thanks to the US writers' strike, Pushing Daisies runs for only eight weeks, but I'll be happily amazed if it remains in the 9pm Saturday slot that long. Grade's best bet is that it provides cult appeal to inbetweenagers who will watch it with their parents. It is wittily written, if over reliant on the cutesy voiceovers, and beautifully cast. As Chuck, Anna Friel shows an unexpected talent for smiling. Her more tangible rival for the pie- maker's hand is a very short, very funny blonde waitress played by Kristin Chenoweth, Annabeth from The West Wing. Set in a timeless, sunny world of its own, half Fifties, half now, Pushing Daisies is Lemony Snicket for grown- ups, a Series of Fortunate Events. If it were only the sort of thing I liked, I think I would like it very much
