Now that the dust from the writers' strike has finally settled and programmes are slowly limping back on to our screens, one thing seems clear: most of the shows launched this season are wounded, in some cases fatally reports Sarah Hughes...
We already know the high profile casualties: NBC's big-budget Bionic Woman remake failed to impress, ABC's Sex And The City wannabe Cashmere Mafia was all high heels and no substance, the same channel's Big Shots proved that some ideas are best kept in the locker room, while CBS's Viva Laughlin still gives me nightmares months later - and I only watched 30 minutes of one episode.
But there are smaller casualties too, shows which remain as US TV parlance has it "on the bubble" in that no-man's land between renewal and cancellation. Some such as the execrable Women's Murder Club and the misguided Wild At Heart remake Life Is Wild deserve to go, others such as CBS's smart vampire drama, Moonlight, and the amusing if unfocused Reaper should, but probably won't, survive.
Nor is it plain sailing for the shows that will live to fight another season. The likes of Life, Dirty Sexy Money and Chuck survived because of the writers' strike, not despite it. In a longer season, declining audiences and uneven plotting would almost certainly have seen them cancelled before June. Even Pushing Daisies, which received largely positive reviews in the US, was far from an unqualified hit, its whimsy repulsing as many as it delighted.
It was a largely similar story for cable TV, with John From Cincinnati, In Treatment and Tell Me You Love Me all firing blanks for HBO, although Flight of the Conchords was a deserving hit. Showtime, perhaps wisely, held fire on all new shows bar Californication.
Indeed of all the new series that burst on our screens so brightly last September only two made a real impact: AMC's Mad Men provided the season's one bit of real quality and proved that there is still room out there for powerful, intelligent and thoughtful drama, while the most talked about new show of the year in the US was the frothy, fluffy and disturbingly popular Gossip Girl, which made the covers of Entertainment Weekly and New York Magazine, was dissected in the New Yorker and the New York Times and may yet change the way in which we view television - it was watched more on internet downloads than on regular TV.
The writers' strike also had one further consequence - it may well have helped to loosen the stranglehold US imports have long had on British television. The truncated season, coupled with the fact that many of the most hyped new shows failed to deliver, has meant that many of these imports received lukewarm UK receptions at best.
Yes, there are still some great US shows out there - Battlestar Galactica's final season is proving suitably doom-ridden while The Wire's last episodes proved that it is possible to go out on your own terms, Lost has recovered its mojo, Friday Night Lights remains the best drama that sadly no one has seen, 30 Rock continues to prove that Tina Fey is the queen of US comedy - but the days when every quality piece of programming seemed to come from the US are, you could think, edging towards an end, not least because of budget cuts for foreign acquisitions. Now all that's required is for British television to come up with some high quality homegrown programming...
Showing posts with label Pushing Daisies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Pushing Daisies. Show all posts
Tuesday, 6 May 2008
Tuesday, 15 April 2008
Second episode of Pushing Daisies dropped by ITV
The second episode of new hit drama Pushing Daisies is to be dropped by ITV, and viewers will jump straight forward to watching episode three, it has emerged.
ITV launched the quirky drama, about a pie maker who can bring the dead back to life, on Saturday night and enjoyed the highest consolidated premiere of a US series since Friends. But the broadcaster was unhappy that the series, starring Britain's Anna Friel alongside American Lee Pace, was delivered as nine episodes when it wanted to allocate it an eight-week slot, so made the decision to lose the second instalment.
ITV spokesperson Ian Johnson said: “Episode two was the only self-contained episode that did not affect the storyline so the decision was taken not to screen it.” He said the US writers’ strike had disrupted filming of the series, leading it to be delivered as an unusual nine-episode package, when the channel usually receives dramas in parts of six or eight. “Because of the US writers’ strike, shows were delivered in random episodes,” he explained. Johnson said the missing episode might be screened at a later date as a stand-alone show.
The ITV1 debut of Pushing Daisies at 9pm on Saturday night attracted an average of 5.7 million viewers, and a total of 7.3 million once Sunday’s repeat was accounted for. The figures mean the show, which has made Anna Friel a star in America, can claim a more successful premiere than the high-rating launches of Ugly Betty, Desperate Housewives and Heroes.
Although the show is yet to be completely embraced by the British critics, in the US, Pushing Daisies has been both a ratings and critical success, and has already won a clutch of awards. The second 22-episode series is currently being filmed in the US.
David Finkelstein thinks he knows where ITV could've made room on their schedule. "Carefully reviewing the packed ITV schedule we've done something that you might have thought impossible," he suggests. "We have identified ten top class shows that could, just could, be dropped to make way for the extra episode, without, we hazard, damaging this nation's cultural life unduly"...
1) The Jeremy Kyle Show: You Cheated on Me With My Friend, So Prove I'm the Dad!
2) Katie & Peter: The Next Chapter
3) Sally Jessy Raphael: Gotcha! Spying on Dangerous Teens
4) Police Stop! Real-life footage of criminals and ordinary people behaving badly
5) Used Car Roadshow
6) Judge Judy
7) Daily Cooks Challenge
8) All Star Mr & Mrs. Celebrity couples reveal how much they know about each other
9) Loose Women
10) Teleshopping
Glad to be of service.
ITV launched the quirky drama, about a pie maker who can bring the dead back to life, on Saturday night and enjoyed the highest consolidated premiere of a US series since Friends. But the broadcaster was unhappy that the series, starring Britain's Anna Friel alongside American Lee Pace, was delivered as nine episodes when it wanted to allocate it an eight-week slot, so made the decision to lose the second instalment.
ITV spokesperson Ian Johnson said: “Episode two was the only self-contained episode that did not affect the storyline so the decision was taken not to screen it.” He said the US writers’ strike had disrupted filming of the series, leading it to be delivered as an unusual nine-episode package, when the channel usually receives dramas in parts of six or eight. “Because of the US writers’ strike, shows were delivered in random episodes,” he explained. Johnson said the missing episode might be screened at a later date as a stand-alone show.
The ITV1 debut of Pushing Daisies at 9pm on Saturday night attracted an average of 5.7 million viewers, and a total of 7.3 million once Sunday’s repeat was accounted for. The figures mean the show, which has made Anna Friel a star in America, can claim a more successful premiere than the high-rating launches of Ugly Betty, Desperate Housewives and Heroes.
Although the show is yet to be completely embraced by the British critics, in the US, Pushing Daisies has been both a ratings and critical success, and has already won a clutch of awards. The second 22-episode series is currently being filmed in the US.
David Finkelstein thinks he knows where ITV could've made room on their schedule. "Carefully reviewing the packed ITV schedule we've done something that you might have thought impossible," he suggests. "We have identified ten top class shows that could, just could, be dropped to make way for the extra episode, without, we hazard, damaging this nation's cultural life unduly"...
1) The Jeremy Kyle Show: You Cheated on Me With My Friend, So Prove I'm the Dad!
2) Katie & Peter: The Next Chapter
3) Sally Jessy Raphael: Gotcha! Spying on Dangerous Teens
4) Police Stop! Real-life footage of criminals and ordinary people behaving badly
5) Used Car Roadshow
6) Judge Judy
7) Daily Cooks Challenge
8) All Star Mr & Mrs. Celebrity couples reveal how much they know about each other
9) Loose Women
10) Teleshopping
Glad to be of service.
Monday, 7 April 2008
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
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
Saturday, 5 April 2008
A career no longer pushing up the daisies
For ITV1 to spend millions of pounds on quite the most bizarre US import of the year, and then to slap it right in the middle of prime time, is a significant gamble: Pushing Daisies is Marmite television. It’s part fairy-tale romance, part comedy, part detective drama – an other-worldly mix that means viewers will either love it or hate it. But, at a time when American TV is awash with cops, doctors, nerds and heroes, it has the winning virtue of at least being an entirely new idea.
It tells the story of Ned (Lee Pace), a pie-maker who learns as a boy that he can bring dead bodies back to life with a single touch. But it gets more complicated. If Ned ever touches a person again once he’s resuscitated them, they’ll die once more – this time for good. And if within 60 seconds of resuscitating someone he hasn’t touched them again, sending them back to the hereafter, someone else in close proximity will die instead. Anna Friel talks to Benji Wilson about coming back from the dead...
It’s a cartoonish conceit (and one that works better on screen than it does in print). It’s complemented by an arch narrator, cotton-candy scenery and, in particular, a deliciously kooky love interest called Chuck (who is murdered, but then Ned brings her back to life – meaning that, of course, he can never touch her again). Chuck – impish, fearless, irresistible – really couldn’t have been played by anyone other than Britain’s own eternal ingénue, Anna Friel.
Yet, until she was cast in this show, Friel’s career was hardly on the up-and-up. After success in Brookside when she was just 16, and then on Broadway in Patrick Marber’s hit play Closer, she had ended up stagnating in the sorry movie franchise Goal!
It’s typical of Friel that, when I start to tiptoe around some of her career turkeys, she butts in. ‘Say what you want – I won’t be insulted at all so don’t think you have to word anything sensitively,’ she says. ‘At 21, going to Broadway, that was the time when things could have just gone whoosh. Things were just at the right place and then I was incredibly badly managed, and given really bad advice. It’s not until now that I’ve gone to America and they’ve all said, “We were loving you – where did you go?” Now, Daisies has put me in the nicest position I could possibly be in.’
She’s referring here to her recent casting opposite Will Ferrell in the Hollywood remake of Land of the Lost, which would never have come without her performance in Pushing Daisies. She admits that her decision to start looking at US TV scripts has revitalised her film career. Previously, she wouldn’t touch small-screen productions.
I always said absolutely not,’ she says. ‘I’m going to keep battling, do that film career – but TV’s actually turned out to be the best way to make that film career come true. Before, if you were in TV it was completely different to doing movies, but now the snobbery’s gone. Now, because of the calibre and the type of people doing TV, lots of people are choosing to do it. It’s the hardest schedule you could ever do but you reap the benefits… if you’re in a good show.’
And there’s the rub – not all TV shows are created equal. Friel knew she had struck gold when she was offered the part of Chuck without audition by the esteemed pairing of series producers Bryan Fuller (Heroes) and Barry Sonnenfeld (Get Shorty, Men in Black).
‘I was very lucky,’ she explains. ‘I got offered about seven shows when I expressed an interest in television and then read another 15 – and this one screamed out loud. I liked its imagination and its humour and I thought the standard of writing was 10 times better than some of the other things I was reading. And I loved that [the heroine] was called Chuck. I thought, “I want to play a girl called Chuck.”’ As Friel says ‘Chuck’ she broadens her native Rochdale accent to make it sound like ‘Chook’. ‘I don’t like “Cherk”, as I have to say in American.’
Chuck, like most of Pushing Daisies, floats somewhere between the real world and the fairies. Friel and her long-term partner, actor David Thewlis, have a two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Gracie, and Friel says she looked to Gracie for emotional pointers. ‘If you’ve died, as Chuck has, it’s the worst thing that can possibly happen to you. If that’s already happened then nothing’s ever scary. Gracie’s open and she’s absolutely fearless,’ says Friel. ‘It’s the fact that she just appreciates everything. I sit here and you could be an absolute bastard and I’d look for the one little quality you have. That’s her thing all the time – she will look for the best in everybody. She’s made of love, she believes in nothing but love and completely appreciates life.’
And if that sounds sentimental – well, that’s Marmite TV. But the critical and audience response to Pushing Daisies in America has shown more love than loathing. Unlike some of her other work, Friel is proud of it. Or at least, as she concludes with a dose of Rochdale realism, ‘I don’t mind people seeing this one, put it that way.’
Pushing Daisies is on ITV1 on Saturday, 5 April at 9.00pm
It tells the story of Ned (Lee Pace), a pie-maker who learns as a boy that he can bring dead bodies back to life with a single touch. But it gets more complicated. If Ned ever touches a person again once he’s resuscitated them, they’ll die once more – this time for good. And if within 60 seconds of resuscitating someone he hasn’t touched them again, sending them back to the hereafter, someone else in close proximity will die instead. Anna Friel talks to Benji Wilson about coming back from the dead...
It’s a cartoonish conceit (and one that works better on screen than it does in print). It’s complemented by an arch narrator, cotton-candy scenery and, in particular, a deliciously kooky love interest called Chuck (who is murdered, but then Ned brings her back to life – meaning that, of course, he can never touch her again). Chuck – impish, fearless, irresistible – really couldn’t have been played by anyone other than Britain’s own eternal ingénue, Anna Friel.
Yet, until she was cast in this show, Friel’s career was hardly on the up-and-up. After success in Brookside when she was just 16, and then on Broadway in Patrick Marber’s hit play Closer, she had ended up stagnating in the sorry movie franchise Goal!
It’s typical of Friel that, when I start to tiptoe around some of her career turkeys, she butts in. ‘Say what you want – I won’t be insulted at all so don’t think you have to word anything sensitively,’ she says. ‘At 21, going to Broadway, that was the time when things could have just gone whoosh. Things were just at the right place and then I was incredibly badly managed, and given really bad advice. It’s not until now that I’ve gone to America and they’ve all said, “We were loving you – where did you go?” Now, Daisies has put me in the nicest position I could possibly be in.’
She’s referring here to her recent casting opposite Will Ferrell in the Hollywood remake of Land of the Lost, which would never have come without her performance in Pushing Daisies. She admits that her decision to start looking at US TV scripts has revitalised her film career. Previously, she wouldn’t touch small-screen productions.
I always said absolutely not,’ she says. ‘I’m going to keep battling, do that film career – but TV’s actually turned out to be the best way to make that film career come true. Before, if you were in TV it was completely different to doing movies, but now the snobbery’s gone. Now, because of the calibre and the type of people doing TV, lots of people are choosing to do it. It’s the hardest schedule you could ever do but you reap the benefits… if you’re in a good show.’
And there’s the rub – not all TV shows are created equal. Friel knew she had struck gold when she was offered the part of Chuck without audition by the esteemed pairing of series producers Bryan Fuller (Heroes) and Barry Sonnenfeld (Get Shorty, Men in Black).
‘I was very lucky,’ she explains. ‘I got offered about seven shows when I expressed an interest in television and then read another 15 – and this one screamed out loud. I liked its imagination and its humour and I thought the standard of writing was 10 times better than some of the other things I was reading. And I loved that [the heroine] was called Chuck. I thought, “I want to play a girl called Chuck.”’ As Friel says ‘Chuck’ she broadens her native Rochdale accent to make it sound like ‘Chook’. ‘I don’t like “Cherk”, as I have to say in American.’
Chuck, like most of Pushing Daisies, floats somewhere between the real world and the fairies. Friel and her long-term partner, actor David Thewlis, have a two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Gracie, and Friel says she looked to Gracie for emotional pointers. ‘If you’ve died, as Chuck has, it’s the worst thing that can possibly happen to you. If that’s already happened then nothing’s ever scary. Gracie’s open and she’s absolutely fearless,’ says Friel. ‘It’s the fact that she just appreciates everything. I sit here and you could be an absolute bastard and I’d look for the one little quality you have. That’s her thing all the time – she will look for the best in everybody. She’s made of love, she believes in nothing but love and completely appreciates life.’
And if that sounds sentimental – well, that’s Marmite TV. But the critical and audience response to Pushing Daisies in America has shown more love than loathing. Unlike some of her other work, Friel is proud of it. Or at least, as she concludes with a dose of Rochdale realism, ‘I don’t mind people seeing this one, put it that way.’
Pushing Daisies is on ITV1 on Saturday, 5 April at 9.00pm
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