"When I was 12, I was placed on a metal table in a veterinary office after hours. The cult trainer of the group had black mesh over his face," Swan said. "He hooked me up to electrodes, placing gel under each one and used an old projector to project images of dead animal carcasses onto the wall in front of me. Every time he would change the slide on the projector screen, he would shock me. He kept saying 'Look what you did,' over and over, trying to suggest that I had killed all of those animals."
A high concept fairy tale of a series, Pushing Daisies ran for two seasons on ABC from 2007 to 2009 and is about Ned (Lee Pace), a man who has the ability to bring the dead back to life with a touch. Couple caveats with that gift/curse: if he doesn't touch them again after one minute, another living person in the vicinity dies in their place; and if he does touch them again at any point, they go back to being dead, permanently. Ned uses this ability as a piemaker, turning rotten fruit back into ripe perfection, and also has a side gig working for a private detective (Chi McBride) reanimating murder victims to find out who killed them before sending them back to eternal rest. One of those victims turns out to be Ned's childhood sweetheart, Chuck (Anna Friel), who he decides to let stay amongst the living. Their love story -- he can never touch her again -- is the bittersweet heart of the story. (A very pandemic-friendly heart, at that.) Created by Bryan Fuller (Hannibal, American Gods), Pushing Daisies has its whimsy levels set to 10 -- I called it "Amelie The TV" show at the time -- but is never too cloying, with eye-popping, colorful cinematography, a macabre undertone, and droll narration by Jim Dale (who was the voice of the Harry Potter audiobooks). The pilot episode was directed by Barry Sonnenfeld (Men in Black, Addams Family) and is a perfect 42 minutes of television, and the rest of S1 is not far behind. The second season runs out of steam (and budget) but is still worth watching. There's nothing else quite like it.
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