Reanimator.('Pushing Daisies')(Television program review)

"Pushing Daisies" is the third TV series created by Bryan Fuller, and, like the others, it has a title that's tailor-made for Variety headline writers in the event of the show's cancellation, the other two being "Dead Like Me," which ran for two seasons on Showtime (2003 and 2004), and "Wonderfalls," which Fuller created with Todd Holland, and which was pulled by Fox after only four episodes, in 2004. (Fuller, who made his bones as a writer and producer of "Star Trek: Voyager," was also the co-executive producer of NBC's popular drama "Heroes" in its first season.) At the moment, "Pushing Daisies" isn't in any danger of cancellation. It's one of the few distinctive shows of the fall season, and it currently anchors ABC's successful Wednesday-night lineup of new series, preceding "Private Practice"--the idiotic and unwatchable spinoff of the idiotic and watchable "Grey's Anatomy"--and "Dirty Sexy Money," a not quite delicious but passably cheesy drama about a rich family's secrets and lies, starring the imposing, white-maned Donald Sutherland (imposing even while playing a ridiculously stereotypical TV patriarch) and Peter Krause, resting from the hard work of "Six Feet Under" in the role of the family's hand-holder and scandal-cleaner-upper.

Fuller's shows are often called quirky, and with good reason--they're a mash-up of the existential and the quotidian, and you can't predict the beats of the action or the tonal shifts. "Dead Like Me," a comedy and a drama, was about a sullen, unmotivated eighteen-year-old girl named George who is killed one sunny day by a falling toilet seat, dislodged from a space station, and is immediately conscripted into a team of grim reapers. It turns out that--at least, in the universe Fuller constructed--being dead is no easier than being alive: the reapers are expected to find apartments for themselves, do their own laundry, and get paying jobs. And conducting souls to the afterlife is a drag; there's so much to learn and so much to get wrong. But, in "Dead Like Me," Fuller didn't lazily equate life and death for easy comedy; the harshness of finality wasn't glossed over, though there were perhaps a few too many ghoulish one-liners. "Wonderfalls" (which is available on DVD, in a set that includes the thirteen episodes that had been filmed when the show was cancelled) is a little more whimsical, in that it takes place amid the camp tackiness of Niagara Falls and involves animal tchotchkes talking to a young woman, Jaye, who, though she's an Ivy League graduate with a degree in philosophy, is working in a souvenir shop and living in a trailer. Like George, Jaye is sullen and unmotivated, but she is also witty, which makes her pleasant company for the viewer. The tchotchkes give her instructions on how to help people--but the instructions are often cryptic or counterintuitive and lead to trouble. The show has a screwball feel, because Jaye's family is crazy, and there's also a romance. It's a rich mixture.

"Pushing Daisies" is as peculiar a creation as you're going to see this year. It's not like anything else, though as you watch it you can't help making a ...