At least we’ll have the comic book continuation. It’s worked tremendously well so far for Farscape, Buffy and Angel. That said, Pushing Daisies charm is so much in the narration, the bright pastels and the whole tone of it visually and aurally that I fear it will be lost in the translation to a words-and-static-images format.

That being said, there’s also that strangely frenetic and beautiful grown-up storybook dialogue that would read just fine. I can certainly put the right voices with the right words. At any rate, since Bryan Fuller pretty much told me (you do know we hang out… oh yeah, all the time!) that the series finale wasn’t going to be satisfying in any way, I’ll be looking for those comics to continue the story.

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You remember Chuck’s dad, right? Poor guy took a dirt nap when Chuck inadvertently brought his mother back to life, only to lose her again that night to a kiss on the forehead. With Dwight Dixon in the picture, snooping around Vivian and digging up caskets to get a locket, the idea was hatched to unearth him (after twenty years no less!) and ask him what he might know about everything.

Now I’m no expert on human decomposition (I usually don’t stick around long enough at the crime scene – badumpBUMP!), but I would think twenty years on a dead body, no matter the embalming technique, wouldn’t be nearly as generous as the writers and makeup artists gave us here. And that’s not all they gave us on that front either. Chuck got thirty seconds to have her last hellos and goodbyes with the man she loved and lost so suddenly so long ago, but is thirty seconds really long enough? How can it be, right?

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(Season 2, Episode 7 – “Robbing Hood”)

I hope the writers are going to have time to wrap up the Dwight Dixon storyline before the cancellation hammer comes down and slashes Pushing Daisies from the schedule forever. Things are chugging right along and we’re getting dangerously close, as well, to the aunts finding out about Chuck and perhaps secrets about Chuck’s parentage coming out as well.

With six episodes left, there’s plenty of time to get to that, but there’s no guarantee that ABC will keep it on the air that long. Now that the word has come out that the series is canceled, it may shed more viewers and get to that point where ABC questions whether to keep it on the air. Assuming that they do, and they really should, the writers knew they had only a 13-episode commitment, so maybe they planned for that and at least set up a conclusion of sorts. It’s really irritating to commit to a series only to have it end mid-stride.

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Clearly, something is wrong with Pushing Daisies. Ratings are in the toilet, and it’s looking like a longshot to even make it into 2009. It’s already off of ABC’s mid-season schedule and hasn’t had a “back nine” or “back two” or “throw us another script” order yet. It may never get one. So what happened? What’s wrong with Pushing Daisies that it can’t find an audience?

Last night, Daisies hit a new series low, dropping 27% from its ratings against Barack Obama’s commercial. At 4.9 million viewers, it only beat out The CW’s America’s Next Top Model, and that by only 0.1 million viewers. Meanwhile, CBS’s comedies The New Adventures of Old Christine and Gary Unmarried had season highs in ratings, up by 25 and 29% respectively. So let’s see if we can get to the bottom of this.

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ABC

(Season 2, Episode 5)

Poor Emerson Cod. This week’s mystery brought real tragedy to the world of our favorite gruff P.I. The master chef behind his favorite dish at the Chinese restaurant downstairs from his office has passed away. Understandably, Emerson was distraught, but still trying to snatch tidbits to eat while interviewing interested parties. Once again, the mystery took a backseat to the character arcs (take a note procedurals).

Tonight, we got a focus on Ned. It’s kind of funny, but in all this time we’ve focuses on Chuck and Emerson and even a bit on Olive, but almost never have we explored Ned’s backstory, aside from the narrative flashbacks. But Ned himself almost never talks about it nor has to confront it in any significant way. Stephen Root (NewsRadio) turned all that on his head by showing up and claiming to have known Ned’s parents.

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ABC

(Season 2, Episode 4)

In a way, I can almost sympathize with the idea behind the rent-a-friend business. They’re right in that, while we’ve created a world of technology that connects us in ways that we almost could never have imagined, we couldn’t be more alone as people. How many of us have friends online we’ve never seen, or rarely see? Just look at the interactions on this site. These are people we don’t see in our day-to-day lives. When I grew up, I knew all the kids in the neighborhood and we all played together … outside. We borrowed sugar from the neighbors and invited them over. And I’m not that old.

I know that wasn’t the point of the show, but it’s never bad when TV makes you think about things. As for Daisies, the facts are these: rumor mongers are starting to fear the worst for this little show with its little audience. While other shows are getting their pickups and renewals, things aren’t looking good for our team of sleuths on that front. Even Ausiello isn’t that confident in a pick-up, encouraging a write-in campaign to save it. Maybe it’ll help that we got to learn a bit more about my second favorite character, Emerson Cod.

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ABC

(Season 2, Episode 3)

The episode opened and gave us the first ever Olive flashback, as far as I can recall. Olive in the convent is still an unusual ongoing plotline, as it’s a strange setting for a show like this, but I’m glad to see her still getting screen-time. Kristin Chenoweth is such a delight in this role, she lights up the screen any time she’s on. For tonight’s review of Pushing Daisies I’m going to examine five things that really worked in this episode.

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