Fandom Overview: Pushing Daisies

[jupirock.livejournal.com]

Hi, I’m Jupi, and I’ll be your guide to wonderful world of Pushing Daisies this month. Despite its brevity (it ran for only 22 episodes) and its relatively simple premise (guy wakes the dead, solves zany murders), this is a difficult series to sum up. Though a lot of what makes it so unique arises out of its idiosyncratic tone, highly stylized dialogue, and vibrant, retro-inspired sets and costumes, there’s much more to it than its gimmicks. It’s also about love and loss and loneliness, choosing to live life to the fullest or spend it trapped in fear, and being different and making connections regardless. Let’s see if I can do it justice.


The Plot
I think it’s brave to try to be happy.
Ned is a lonely pie-maker whose touch can wake the dead. If he touches a dead thing once, it will return to life and remain that way. If he touches it again, it will die again, and no amount of prodding on his part can ever bring it back. The catch is that if leaves it alive for more than one minute, something else has to die.

Despite this peculiarity, he lives a mostly normal life. He owns and operates a pie shop (he buys rotten produce on the cheap and then returns it to fresh-picked levels of flavor with a tap), he has a dog, Digby (who he hasn't been able to touch since he brought him back to life nineteen years earlier), and a sort-of friendship with Olive, a waitress at the Pie Hole (who is deeply in unrequited love with him and has no idea what he can do). Then private investigator Emerson Cod discovers his ability, and he is convinced to enter into a very profitable business arrangement: Ned touches murder victims, asks who killed them, returns them to death, and then he and Emerson collect the reward.

This partnership brings the Pie Hole back from the brink of financial collapse, but it’s not enough to heal Ned’s many and various psychological wounds. But when his childhood sweetheart, Charlotte “Chuck” Charles, is murdered on a cruise ship, Emerson enlists him to solve her murder, and he is presented with a once-in-a-lifetime shot at happiness. Despite the cost, he can’t bring himself to kill her again, and the two embark on a relationship—with the caveat that they can never, ever touch, or she will die again, this time forever. Then things get complicated.

Before it ended, the show introduced a number of plot threads—mysterious gold pocket watches, the true reason Ned's father left him, and secrets involving Chuck's parents, all of which seemed to be interrelated somehow—but most of these were left hanging, due to both the effects of the 2007 Writer's Strike and the untimely cancellation. Regardless, one could argue the main story—that of the characters' growth and development, which were explored much more fully—got at least something closer to a successful arc and resolution.


The Characters
Ned / The Pie-Maker
I bake pies and wake the dead. I lead a very sheltered life.

(Lee Pace)
The protagonist. No last name given. When he was ten, his mother died of a brain aneurysm and he brought her back to life, unaware that another life would need to be sacrificed in place of hers—a life that turned out to belong to his best friend Chuck’s father. Since he was also unaware of the “second touch: death” rule, she died again, permanently, when she next kissed him goodnight. Her death led Ned’s father to desert him at the gloomy Longborough School for Boys, where he whiled away a miserable childhood honing his understanding of his gift, developing a set of grade-A abandonment issues, and obsessing over pies, which remind him of his mother. Despite a host of fears and neuroses and a touch of selfishness resulting from never really having had to deal with other people’s feelings before, he’s very good-natured, and gradually gets drawn out into the world through his work with Emerson and his relationship with Chuck.

Charlotte “Chuck” Charles
I suppose dying’s as good a reason as any to start living.

(Anna Friel)
She was orphaned when her father died to pay the cost of Ned’s mother’s brief return to life, something she remains unaware of for most of the first season, and was subsequently raised by her agoraphobic step-aunts Lily and Vivian. Caring for them kept her close to home for most of her life, until one day she decided she wanted to see something of the world and signed up for a Tahitian getaway. While on this getaway, she was strangled to death with a plastic sack. Ned brings her back to life, but in order to preserve his (now their) secret, she must stay away from her previous life, including her aunts. Chuck is cheerful, kind-hearted, and book-smart, with her own set of eccentricities and a powerful lust for life, but she naturally has mixed feelings about her new situation. Her various family dramas form the backbone of the show’s overall storyline.

Emerson Cod
I’m not God, but if I was, I’d be an angry God.

(Chi McBride)
Emerson is a gruff, no-nonsense PI who is, quite often, the only person among the cast with his head screwed on straight. Mostly he just wants to solve his case and collect his reward, but over time he comes to really care about Ned, Olive, and even Chuck, with whom he rarely sees eye-to-eye. He loves knitting, pop-up books, and good food, and hopes someday to be reunited with the daughter who was taken from him by his con-artist ex. As the show goes on, he develops a friendship with Olive, who he calls “Itty Bitty,” and a romance with Simone Hundin, a professional dog trainer.

Olive Snook
Wouldn’t it just rock ‘n’ roll if liking someone meant they had to like you back? ’Course, that’d be a different universe, and something else’d probably suck.

(Kristin Chenoweth)
Olive, the only waitress at the Pie Hole, is nosy, loud, and verbose even by the standards of this show. She's deeply in love with Ned, and none too pleased when Chuck shows up. More than a bit clingy and jealous, she nevertheless gradually learns to let Ned go and look for happiness elsewhere, and even becomes best friends with Chuck. Believing Chuck faked her death for some possibly-shady reason, she acts as her proxy with her aunts, spending time with them and helping them heal from their grief and deal with their agoraphobia. She resents being simultaneously locked out of the loop and expected to keep her friends' myriad dangerous secrets. Despite not knowing about his magic touch, she was for a long time Ned's only human friend, and he does love her—just not romantically. When she's alone, she expresses her emotions via Broadway music.

Lily Charles
Lily: Is it vodka?
Olive: Water.
Lily: As in Russian for vodka?

(Swoosie Kurtz)
Formerly one half of world-famous synchronized swimming duo the Darling Mermaid Darlings, she and her sister gave up their careers after she lost one of her eyes in a tragic cat litter accident. At least, that’s the reason they gave—really, their withdrawal from the world is more complicated than that. She’s surly, hard-drinking, and rarely without a shotgun handy, but she would do anything for either her sister or Chuck. She has secrets of her own, as Olive discovers.

Vivian Charles

I don’t know how we survived without it. It’s like a sex addiction! I would imagine.

(Ellen Greene)
Chuck’s other aunt, and the other half of the Darling Mermaid Darlings. An extremely odd, socially awkward woman with a fear of being touched and a very sweet nature, she appears in many ways to be the more fragile of the sisters. But appearances can be misleading, as she proves by being more eager than Lily to get out of the house and take back their lives. Like Lily, she loves birds, cheese, and leopard print, and is struggling with her grief for Chuck.


Other Characters
The Narrator (Jim Dale): The show’s narrator, natch. Fond of wordplay and giving ages to the minute, he gives us insights into both the main characters and the murders of the week.

Digby and Pigby: Digby is Ned’s golden retriever, who died nineteen years before the start of the show, and was the first thing Ned ever brought back. Despite the fact that they can’t touch, Digby has been Ned’s only constant companion since he was a child, and doesn’t seem to be aging. Pigby is Olive’s truffle-hunting pig, who she picked up during a stint at a nunnery.

Dwight Dixon (Stephen Root): An ex-convict who served in the U.N. Peacekeepers along with Ned and Chuck’s respective fathers. He’s looking for a pair of golden pocket watches belonging to his former comrades, and is willing to dig up Chuck’s grave—and worse—to get them. Dates Vivian for a while, much to Lily’s chagrin.

Charles Charles (Josh Randall): Chuck’s dad. Died when Ned brought his mother back to life. Before Chuck was born, he was engaged to stepsister Vivian, but broke it off when he had the affair which produced Chuck. Chuck’s mother died in childbirth, leaving him to take care of her, and it seems he was an excellent father. This doesn’t necessarily mean he was the greatest of human beings, however.

Randy Mann (David Arquette): A socially awkward taxidermist. Essentially the person Ned would be if Ned didn’t have superpowers. A love interest for Olive.

Alfredo Aldarisio (Raúl Esparza): A peddler of homeopathic mood enhancers, which he himself uses to combat his deep-seated fear that a failure of gravity will result in all the air being lost from the Earth. Another love interest for Olive.

Maurice & Ralston (Alex and Graham Miller): Ned’s half-brothers. Identical twins and professional magicians. Their father abandoned them just as he abandoned Ned, but they believe he must have had a good reason for doing so.

Simone Hundin (Christine Addams): A professional dog trainer with serious control issues. A love interest for Emerson.


The Fandom
With so few episodes aired so many years ago, it’s hardly surprising that Pushing Daisies no longer has much of an active fandom. This is compounded by the fact that its various idiosyncrasies make it very difficult to write for. So it takes a bit of work to find good fic. The most popular pairing by far is Ned/Chuck, though there’s also a decent amount of Ned/Olive, and some Chuck/Olive, Chuck/Ned/Olive, and Emerson/Olive. Olive/Randy and Olive/Alfredo will often show up as background pairings.

Resources
The first place to look for fic should probably be the show’s page on the Archive of Our Own, which is quite well-stocked, all things considered. The various communities dedicated to it on LJ are all but dead, but it’s worth looking through pushing_daisies, daisies_fanfic, and thepiehole to see what you can find. There’s also a decent amount of fic on FFN and some on Yuletide. The fandom also has a minor presence on Tumblr, at least near as I can tell, but it doesn’t seem to be the best place for fic. If I’m missing something important, please let me know—I’m always looking for more of this show.