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Few TV producers were more adept at turning Death into a punchline than Bryan Fuller, as witness his cable efforts Dead Like Me and Wonderfalls. Fuller maintained this singular tradition in his first major "over-the-air" series, the seriocomic, semi-fantastic ABC offering Pushing Daisies, which in fact had been originally conceived as a spinoff of Dead Like Me but ended up being developed separately. Lee Pace starred as Ned, who at the tender age of ten discovered that he possessed a rare gift: the ability to bring the dead back to life simply by touching them. Unfortunately, those whom he "resurrected" could only stay alive for 60 seconds, whereupon Ned had to touch them again and send them back to the Other World permanently: if Ned didn't do this within the alotted time-frame, someone else in the near vicinity would have to die in the place of the person he'd revived. When this peculiar talent resulted in the demise of his mother, Ned was shipped off to live with his eccentric aunts Lily (Swoosie Kurtz) and Vivian (Ellen Greene), a pair of retired synchronized swimmers. As an adult, Ned supported himself with his own pie factory, which did terrific business thanks to his ability to "re-ripen" dead fruit. He also moonlighted as an assistant to private detective Emerson Cod (Chi McBride) and Cod's aide-de-camp Olive Snook (Kristin Chenoweth), enabling Cod to solve murders by bringing the victims back to life long enough to identify their killers. Among these murdered souls was Ned's own childhood sweetheart Charlotte "Chuck" Charles (Anna Friel)--but when time came to give Chuck the fatal "second touch", Ned didn't have the heart to do it. Thus, Chuck lived on as Ned's "inspiration", taking hilariously elaborate precautions to avoid ever coming into physical contact with her beloved Ned, and keeping a healthy distance from anyone else lest she inadvertently condemn them to death (remember the above-mentioned "rules" of resurrection?) Narrated by British comedian Jim Dale, Pushing Daisies first blossomed into life on October 3, 2007. Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide




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