The fatal consequences of a simple kiss

It’s known as the Moonlighting Effect - the fatal consequences of a simple kiss. For the first three series of the 1980s “will they, won’t they?” romcom/ detective show, Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd kept the sexual tension fizzing at an almost unbearable level. In the grand finale of season three, they, and we, could bear it no longer. At the end of the episode, they threw themselves into each other’s arms, so overcome with passion that they smashed an expensive glass table as they writhed to Be My Baby by the Ronettes. At which point, the ratings simply vanished.

The producer of The X Files, Chris Carter, repeatedly cited the show as a cautionary tale and an explanation for his determination to keep Agent Mulder’s hands off Scully. In Friends, conversely, Ross and Rachel had to split up within about two episodes of getting it together. Every series. For 10 years. There are only so many times you can pull that one off.




Since then, television producers have struggled to handle this essential conundrum. While fairy tales may get away with “and they lived happily ever after”, if you want to get paid for another series, you need to come up with something better than that. And, this year, American television has found it - get a nerd to write the show. Nerds, by definition, spend most of their adolescence, and possibly their adult lives, in a state of endless yearning, writes Stephen Armstrong. They also have curious sci-fi imaginations that allow them to begin their fantasies with the premise: “What if everyone in the world disappeared apart from me and her?”

Thus, we have ITV’s latest so-hot-it-will-fry-your-fingers import, Pushing Daisies. The series has two things going for it: Anna Friel in a role that doesn’t involve weeping; and a conceit that quite literally defies the possibility of the “will they, won’t they?” couple ever consummating. He - a pie-maker called Ned, played by Lee Pace - discovers as a youth that he can touch dead things and bring them back to life. This comes, as in all fairy tales, at a terrible cost. For each person raised, someone or something must die. And, if he touches the recently resurrected a second time, they die. Really die.

Ned uses his skills to keep the pie business afloat, solving murders with a local private eye, Emerson Cod, until one day he comes across the murdered corpse of the only woman he has ever loved: his childhood sweetheart, Charlotte “Chuck” Charles, played by Friel. He raises her, then solves the murder, and they end up working together, their youthful bodies wracked with torrid desire, but all the time knowing that if he touches her, she dies. No Ronettes here.

“It is all about imagination,” Friel explains. “I can look into Lee’s eyes, and I’ll be saying, ‘So, Ned, how are you doing? (subtext: I want to shag you, I want to shag you)’, or ‘Well, Ned (God, I want to touch you)’. We aren’t saying that, but our characters are thinking it constantly. It’s like black-and-white films, where you’d watch the entire thing just to get that tiny kiss at the end. It’s incredibly positive and uplifting. I think people were getting fed up with turning their televisions on and having to watch the dreary, dismal world. This is a kind of Wizard of Oz story, with a romance.”

Curiously, Daisies is not alone in spinning out far-fetched fantasies to overcome more, um, physical fantasies. In Channel 4’s Reaper, Seattle slacker Sam Oliver pines for his co-worker Andi until his 21st birthday, when he finds his parents have sold him to Satan to work as an escaped-soul bounty hunter. Which rather stifles the romance. In Virgin 1’s Chuck, an awkward college drop-out of that name gets the entire contents of the US security service’s main-frame computer downloaded into his brain seconds before it explodes. Again, a problem when it comes to wooing his CIA bodyguard, Sarah. Then there’s Living TV’s Moonlight, in which the hero is a vampire and the girl isn’t, so, if they kiss...

Behind these shows are writer/ producers such as Bryan Fuller, of Star Trek and Heroes (Daisies), and The OC’s Josh Schwartz (Chuck). Both claim their central characters are largely autobiographical. All the shows have broad, bright palettes - Men in Black’s Barry Sonnenfeld directed the Daisies pilot - and all act as an almost innocent counterweight to more sexually explicit shows such as Californication, Grey’s Anatomy and Desperate Housewives, or the dark sci-fi violence of The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Lost and Battlestar Galactica.

That’s not to say it’s a battle between sugar and spice. There’s bone-dry humour in the quick-fire dialogue and strange plot devices of Daisies and Chuck especially. Some way into Daisies, for instance, a character removes her previously unmentioned artificial leg. Said limb is never discussed again. Nor is there any scripted explanation for Ned’s mysterious ability. In this breezy dismissal of rational dissection, the show most closely resembles Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie - which it just so happens is Fuller’s favourite film. “All the things I love are represented in that movie,” he says. “It’s a movie that will make me cry based on kindness, as opposed to sadness.

“I think intimacy is so much more interesting when you take away the physical part of a relationship, because characters on television tend to fall into bed like there are banana peels around the mattress. It’s kind of fun to take that away from them and see how far they can get romantically without ever consummating it.”

Although, as Friel explains, the couple do their best to couple with the aid of bizarre accoutrements. “We start off with a very, very thick condom and, throughout the series, we find many ways of doing it, from dancing in bee-keeper suits to kissing through clingfilm and in body bags,” she giggles. “The American press seem to find it very sexy.”

The American public seems to think it’s kind of fun as well. All the above shows have been picked up for a second series, even after the carnage of the writers’ strike, which proved catastrophic for new shows such as Bionic Woman, starring Michelle Ryan, another émigré Brit. And there’s one more resurrection involved in Pushing Daisies: that of Friel’s reputation.

“I do sometimes worry that I will be 80 and they’ll still be calling me ‘Brookside’s Anna Friel’,” she sighs. “I know that was a huge thing at the start of my career, but it was 14 years ago. It’s not a big deal, but it’s refreshing to go to America, where there’s none of that. They saw me on Broadway in Closer, and they don’t ask about Robbie Williams or Darren Day. I’m proud of all the work I’ve done since then, although it has mainly been harrowing roles that require me to cry a lot. Which is why I like playing Chuck.

“I think if you did come back from the dead and had a second chance at life, you would embrace it with both hands and do every single thing as if it were positively the last day of your life.

“So she’s a very optimistic, bouncy, happy character. I’ve based her quite a lot on my two-year-old daughter, because she wakes up every day and just everything’s fantastic and mystical and wonderful. And really – there can be no more romantic view of the world than that.”

Pushing Daisies is on ITV from Saturday at 9pm; Moonlight is on Living TV on Tuesdays at 10pm; Chuck is on Virgin 1 from tomorrow at 10pm; Reaper is on Channel 4 from May