Fun With the Touch of Death

Television | Review of: Pushing Daisies, and Carpoolers

By BRENDAN BERNHARD
October 2, 2007

A Day-Glo "forensic romance" (as ABC calls it), "Pushing Daisies" will appeal to viewers with a sweet tooth, as well as a love of bright colors, arch voice-overs, cutesy dialogue, whimsical characters, and, perhaps, a hunger for what may just amount to a new twist on the familiar interracial buddy genre: The black guy's a private investigator, the white guy's a … baker. Okay, I guess that counts as new.

"Pushing Daisies," which starts tomorrow, is the story of Ned (Lee Pace), a pie-maker who, as a young boy, discovers he has an unusual gift: He can bring the dead back to life with one touch, but if he touches them again they die, this time for good. Furthermore, if he doesn't touch them again within exactly one minute, someone else in the immediate vicinity will have to snuff it.

We learn much of this from the voice-over by British actor Jim Dale, best known in this country for his narration of the Harry Potter audio books. Mr. Dale is possessed of a voice that doesn't merely suspend disbelief, it floats it gently out the window, where it turns into a sugarplum fairy and lands softly on a little girl's pillow. Either that or it makes you change the channel.

Directed by Barry Sonnenfeld, of "Men in Black" fame, the pilot episode is as visually striking as anything you're likely to see on television. Whether you want to see anything this visually striking on television is another matter. Almost every shot looks like a gaudy, overpriced dessert, and that's not because the hero is a pastry chef. Even as you admire the ingenuity, there's a reflex cringe. Imagine a particularly quirky and self-admiring episode of "This American Life" freed from all the constraints of the documentary format, and you'll have some idea of what you're in for.

Yet this opening episode is cleverly crafted, and the three principals — Mr. Pace as the nerdy pie-maker understandably shy of human contact; Chi McBride as Emerson Cod, the private investigator who's figured out a way to make money from Ned's peculiar talent, and Anna Friel as Charlotte, Ned's childhood sweetheart who unexpectedly re-enters his life — are all well cast. Ms. Friel is particularly good at being adorable, and Mr. McBride provides a touch of ballast in a "Just keepin' it real, bro'" kind of way, though in fact his performance is as minutely mannered as everyone else's.

Surprisingly, this opening episode manages to create some real tension, or at least interest, out of an unlikely murder plot. In the age of Showtime's "Californication" and other raunchy full-frontal diversions, there's also something refreshing about a show that occupies itself with two lovers (Ned and Charlotte) who, as if they'd been scraped off Keats's Grecian Urn, may stare at each other longingly, but never touch.

* * *

If you want to see ABC's "Carpoolers," a four-wheel sitcom that makes its premiere tonight, you should either stay in to watch the historic occasion as it happens, or at least make sure to record it. Something tells me there may not be many more episodes.

A better title for this almost endearingly clumsy comedy would be "Little Shots," since its preoccupations — four men threatened or exasperated by the women in their lives — is remarkably similar to ABC's much more polished production, "Big Shots," in which the men are CEOs rather than middle-manager types, and get to whine about their wives poolside in luxurious spas or at swank PR events.

Here the guys get their grousing in during the 45-minute drive to work in the morning and the 45-minute drive back. The pilot episode revolves around the discovery by Gracen (Fred Goss), a professional mediator, that his bubbly blond wife Leila (Faith Ford) seems to be making more money than he does. This would seem to be less of a problem than the fact that their 22-year-old son, Marmaduke — all the men on the show have unusual or bizarre names — still lives at home and never seems to wear trousers.

Nonetheless, in the confessional cauldron of the daily commute, Leila's purchase of a $400 toaster becomes proof positive that something must be done to right the marital balance of power. The toaster itself, which looks like it could withstand a nuclear war, takes on the symbolic significance of a fetish, and the three other carpoolers — divorced dentist Laird (Jerry O'Connell), mild-mannered father of seven Aubrey (Jerry Minor), and recently married Dougie (Tim Peper) — persuade Gracen that the only way to save his masculine honor is to steal the toaster and destroy it.

The best you can say for "Carpoolers" is that it isn't pretentious, though it's hard to imagine how it could be, under the circumstances. It also has a certain naïve, if thoroughly clichéd, sweetness. Quite a few of ABC's new shows — "Cashmere Mafia," "Women's Murder Club," "Cavemen," and "Big Shots" — adhere to a strict division of the sexes (what's going on over there?) and there was bound to be at least one clunker. Ignore it while it lasts.

* * *

For better or worse (I think it's easy to decide which), the television personality of last week was undoubtedly the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. I happened to be on a tour of CNN's offices in the Time Warner Center just as the diminutive Iranian was speaking at Columbia University.

As one would expect, the channel's New York headquarters are a high-tech marvel — I have never seen so many screens of all kinds in one place — but it was the miniature plasma screen (tuned to CNN, naturally) in the elevator that impressed me the most. CNN was carrying the speech live, and so there was Mr. Ahmadinejad holding forth — a little man on a little screen in a large elevator. I didn't visit the restrooms, but I wouldn't have been surprised to have discovered him in there, too.

Thinking about the experience afterward, it occurred to me that more and more places are going to look like CNN's headquarters as the number of plasma screens of all sizes continues to proliferate. In the end they'll resemble talking wallpaper: omnipresent, meaningless, entertaining, distracting, annoying, inescapable. And when nature calls, the dictator of the week — or David Beckham or rioting students or kidnapped children or whoever — will be there with you, whether you like it or not.

Fun With the Touch of Death

Television | Review of: Pushing Daisies, and Carpoolers

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