Pushing Daisies is a very eccentric, dark comedy centered upon the life of one Ned (played by Lee Pace) who as young boy discovered he could bring dead creatures back to life with a touch. Unfortunately, a second touch returns them to death, permanently, a lesson he learned when his recently resurrected mother kissed him goodnight. And there is a price for this life, for if he does not return the deceased to death within one minute, another must die in their stead. That lesson cost his childhood sweetheart, Charlotte "Chuck" Charles, her father. Soon she moved away, to be raised her neurotic aunts. Ned grows up alone in a private school environment, and becomes a pie maker, his material costs greatly abetted by his special talent. When his "talent" is noticed by a money-hungry private investigator Emerson Cod (played by Chi McBride), the rather introverted Ned is convinced to use his talent to help solve murders and then collect the reward money.

His life is fairly normal for a time. He operates The Pie Hole, a pie shop he runs assisted by the curvaceous Olive Snook (played by Kristin Chenoweth). Olive would love to warm Ned's oven, but the pie maker still dreams of his childhood love, whom he inadvertently orphaned. Then one day Emerson Cod takes him to a funeral parlor to interview the recently deceased Charlotte Charles (played by Anna Friel). He touches her, and they recognize each other, even though they last spoke as children. Soon Ned's 'free minute' has passed and another has died. And Ned realizes he can never touch Chuck again, even though both of them desire nothing more than to touch other.

Pushing Daisies was created by Brian Fuller also known for his work on Dead Like Me and writing credits on Star Trek: Voyager, Heroes and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Fuller also produces the show, along with Bruce Cohen, Dan Jinks and Barry Sonnenfeld who also directed several episodes.

The show has an episodic feel, because many episodes center around Emerson and Ned's efforts to solve different murders, with the un-deceased Chuck tagging along and often helping. But there are other complications, such as Chuck's recognition that she cannot reveal her second life to her grieving Aunts Lily and Vivian (played by Swoosie Kurtz and Ellen Greene). The undeniable and potentially fatal sexual tension between Pie Maker Ned and Chuck is part of the show's appeal. Ned and Chuck know they can never, ever touch, even accidentally. Yet they are very much in love and very much want to consummate their passion. And of course Olive senses this and is immediately threatened by Chuck, who presents a clear and present danger to her unrequited love for Ned.

But a large part of the show's success comes from real chemistry between Pace and Friel as Ned and Chuck. Another factor is the larger than life set design, full of brilliant colors and patterns. The Pie Hole looks like a pie from the outside. Many of the cars and buildings came from earlier periods, including Cod's '67 Lincoln Continental with suicide doors. It's almost like a comic, only a bit too real. The show is funny, and very different, with interesting characters, including Paul Reubens in a recurring role as olfactory expert Oscar Vibenius. The show only played for a half season in 2007 thanks to the writer's strike, but has been renewed for 2008-9 by ABC.

The show received immediate critical praise from almost everyone, in part because of the clever premise, chemistry, and clever execution. PD won Satellite and Family TV awards, a best direction award from the Director's Guild of America and was nominated for three Golden Globes. Given the fact that it's very funny, and there's nothing else really like Pushing Daisies the critical praise is easy to believe.

The previous writeup is a fine summary of this marvellous show, and it does a good job of explaining what Pushing Daisies is "about." But if all you hear about is the premise, then you run the risk of assuming -- as I did -- that it is simply a re-imagining of the lovely but doomed Dead Like Me, which ran from 2003 to 2005. In Dead Like Me, you may recall, a teenaged girl named George dies and becomes a "reaper," a sort of ghostly middleman whose job is to pull souls from people who are about to die by violence, and then herd them safely into some unknown (both to her and to the viewer) afterlife.

Pushing Daisies and Dead Like Me have much in common, which is not surprising given the fact that the two shows shared writers and crew. Even the special effects are similar: when George sends a soul on, the little flow of electricity from her fingertips ironically resembles the appearance of Ned bringing the dead back to life. Both shows describe worlds that are governed by supernatural rules different from the ones we know, but which are consistent in their way, and subtle enough to be possible restrictions even on the world that we actually live in.

But Pushing Daisies is in fact profoundly different from Dead Like Me. In fact, I would say it is different from every other television program I've seen. Though the premise is quirky and sweet, and though the fairy-tale structure of each episode is very creative, and though the casting is pitch-perfect, none of that is what makes Pushing Daisies great.

No, what makes it great is its tone: deliberately mannered both visually and narratively, Pushing Daisies makes no effort to efface the fact that it is a story. In this it is much more like a children's movie than a TV series: the colours are weirdly bright, the camera angles are self-conscious and obtrusive, and scene after scene is set up like a still life, with props and actors arranged artificially but attractively across a garish tableau. I'm reminded over and over again of Tim Burton, whose creepy-cartoonish influence I see everywhere in Pushing Daisies.

The dialogue, too, is hyper-scripted and artificial. The lightning-paced, zinging banter so popular in "intelligent" television these days (Weeds, House, M.D., anything by Joss Whedon) has been slowed down and stiffened in Pushing Daisies, which is perfectly appropriate given that Pushing Daisies is, in its essence, a fairy tale. If you were to read, say, Jack and the Beanstalk, you wouldn't expect to find snippy exchanges of the sort that characterize Dr. House's medical team. Instead, you would need to listen as you're told "what happened"; the characters contribute to the story, of course, but in some important sense it does not actually belong to them.

So how do we learn "what happened" in Pushing Daisies? Plenty is going on onscreen at all times; I'm not saying that the show is dull by any means. Nevertheless, the narrative is much bigger than any of its characters, meaning that there must be a wise voice putting the whole thing into perspective for the viewer. Now television in our generation has mostly done away with the narrator, who is commonly seen as, at best, a quaintly outdated mode of telling a story, and, at worst, a sign of laziness on the part of writers who don't know how to make their characters move the story along. Even in "serious" literature, the omniscient third-person narrator has fallen out of fashion for many of the same reasons. Hence the rule, so beloved in amateur writers' workshops, to show, don't tell, and the admiration shared by many (including me) for the so-called "tight third" or "limited third" perspective, in which we are only told as much as a character herself happens to know.

But Pushing Daisies is reactionary in this as in so many other things, and uses a voiceover to brilliant effect. Just like the narrator in a children's story, the voice in Pushing Daisies patiently tells us all about what we can't see: the thoughts and feelings of the characters, the secrets they are keeping from one another, events in the past that affect what is about to happen, and perhaps most importantly, the supernatural rules that shape the world and guide the actions of the people in it. The narrator's quirks (his tendency to tell us the age of each character we meet, precise down to the hour; his insistence on referring to Ned as "the pie-maker" rather than by name; his introduction to each flashback with a curt "The facts are these") give him a personality -- arguably the strongest in the show -- which reinforces the idea that reality itself has an opinion on the events we're witnessing.

Such a move would have been very easy to botch. Today's viewers (and I would have counted myself among them before actually seeing the show) don't like to be talked at, and they don't like to be bored with backstory and psychologizing. Besides, even if the move hadn't been botched, it's still not to everyone's taste; just one small step sideways, and I could see all the things I find endearing about Pushing Daisies becoming immensely wanky and irritating. Though I'm completely smitten by the show, I would understand if you aren't.

(Incidentally, the only other contemporary TV show that I can think of that uses a narrator/voiceover is the late and much-lamented Arrested Development. The narrator in AD started out relatively straight-faced -- the Bluth family is large and complex, and a narrator is a handy way to help the viewer keep track of who's who. But the narrator became more and more ironic and self-referential as the show progressed. Halfway through the second season, he finds himself "talking back" to the characters, who of course can't hear him. (His is the voice of the kid in the audience at the horror movie yelling, "Don't go in there, you idiot!") Very, very occasionally, he even daringly refers to himself in the first person, raising without ever answering the question of just who, exactly, knows so much about these people. All this he does with the bland, modulated tone of the documentary voiceover, which is of course where AD draws so much of its humour.)

If Pushing Daisies lasts (I hope it does) and if it is remembered in the future as great television (I hope it is), then I think that will only be partially because of the premise. People who enjoy Pushing Daisies will often evangelize it to their friends as "this really great story about a guy who can't touch his girlfriend because he has this weird resurrection-annihilation superpower that he can't control," etc. But when I evangelize it, I end up focusing so much more on the sheer strangeness of its visuals and the deliberateness of its script. There is something stubbornly retro about it, but like so much that is retro in the twenty-first century, it somehow loops back around into irony.