Really, I want to like Pushing Up Daisies. I like the way it looks. I generally love quirk, and I am a big fan of children's tales. Heck, I like fluffy bunnies and butterflies! And I'm glad Pushing Up Daisies been renewed. I am hopeful about what its success means for other shows. But...

...It's so damned tweeeee. Small doses of twee are okay, but an hour? I just can't take it. I've tried. Seriously, I want insulin after more than 20 minutes of the show. I need ipecac after an hour. I now know that when "Tontant Weader frowed-up" after reading AA Milne's House at Pooh Corner, it was probably a relief.

And does anyone else out there notice any similarity between this show and the Walgreen's "Perfect" commercials? (<link>) Watching an hour of Daisies like being strapped down, Clockwork Orange-style, and being forced to watch 120 Walgreen's commercials, without the leavening does of reality at the end.

The show is twee, but it's cut through with a constant stream of gruesome dead bodies, and the incredible sadness of two lovers who can't touch, a woman (Olive, played by Kristin Chenoweth) whose love is unrequited, and the two aunts, whose will to live seems to have died with their niece. All this tartness provides a nice contrast to the otherwise overwhelming sweetness.

You'd think that would be enough, but the constant overlay of the treacley music combined with the precious narration just pushes into teeth-rotting territory.

Hey, they had "Birdhouse In Your Soul" in the last one! That was AWESOME.

My favorite supernatural/sci-fi shows tend toward people screaming at each other and crying and blood and violence and death (LOST, Supernatural, Battlestar Galactica, etc.). There is, on almost all of them, an overwhelming sense of pathos. Despair is pretty much the baseline emotion (there are people trapped on a mysterious island with no chance for escape, literally battling the forces of hell and all the evil in an everyday human soul, and being chased relentlessly across the stars by an immortal enemy). So when a show comes along that radically proposes that life isn't necessarily ALL pain, I like it.

I was a fan of Fuller's earlier shows as well (Wonderfalls and Dead Like Me, both of which had a mythic, fairy-tale quality to them) and hated that they were both cancelled. When I heard that Pushing Daisies was coming out, I begged everyone I knew who might be even vaguely interested in this sort of show to watch it, just to keep the rating up. So far, only one person has told me that the show is just too strange for them. The rest appear to be as enchanted by it as I am.

I am a huge fan of the first season of Dead Like Me. Strange doesn't bother me. It's the twee. And I can even take touches of twee - just not an hour.

I tried to watch again this week. I love the way it looks. The cast is amazing. But the narration and music just make it unbearable for me.