Oh, Pushing Daisies, how I’ve missed you!

After almost a year, the series finally came back tonight. Somewhere around the second commercial break, I realized exactly why I love it.

But it’s not a simple thing to explain. Care to join me for some pie talk…  after the jump?

I love Pushing Daisies because it’s fearless. And I don’t mean “fearless” like most TV critics do: PD doesn’t depict graphic sex or violence, but its creators risk something nevertheless. They risk alienating their audience by delivering the most stylized show on television.

In ten episodes, the series has never seemed realistic. Even True Blood aims for verisimilitude, with its vampires living in authentically grungy swamp shacks, but Pushing Daisies makes everything as fantastic as possible.

That starts with the premise, of course: Ned (Lee Pace) is a pie maker who can bring dead things to life just by touching them. That would be great, except his power has fine print: If he lets dead things live for more than a minute, then other things die in their stead, and if he ever touches the reanimated things a second time, then they permanently die. Because of these rules, Ned has an undead girlfriend named Chuck (Ann Friel) that he cannot kiss, cannot hug, cannot caress in the slightest.

Do Nuns Dream in Electric Blue Habits?

Oh, the pain of unrequited love! Oh, the tenderness forever denied! Everything else in the show is just as over-the-top as Ned and Chuck’s dilemma. Like the fact that every week, the couple join their friend Emerson (Chi McBride), a private investigator, to solve a murder.

Last night’s crime was typically grandiose. The dead girl worked for a company called Betty’s Bees, which sold honey-based moisturizers and lotions, and she was killed after someone unleashed a swarm of bees on her face. Zounds!

The bee people also inspired some intense production and costume design. Their offices had windows shaped like honeycombs, and the floors had the same pattern. And every employee rocked honey-colored outfits, every day.

Even when it’s not so literal, the design is always that bold. Nun don’t wear habits: They wear electric blue frocks with elaborate headpieces. Chuck doesn’t own a few books: She has a floor-to-ceiling library of ancient brown volumes, each with a perfectly cracked spine.

In other words, a single glimpse at this show tells you it’s a fantasy. Another clue? The indeterminate year. Chuck spies on Betty with a high-tech microphone in her bee-shaped pendant, but everything gets recorded to an ancient reel-to-reel tape player. Antidepressants are in copious supply, but no one has a cell phone.

I know some people find this cutesy-poo, especially since the actors give heightened performances to match the toy-shop tone. However, I admire this twinkly gestalt because it has such an obvious purpose.

Pushing Daisies is oversized so that intense emotions can seem normal.

Let Me Tell You How I Feel!

If Ned and Chuck couldn’t touch each other in a realistic series, their predicament could feel forced. In Pushing Daisies, however, it seems like a natural consequence of their unusual world.

That lets the series tackle massive emotions in surprising ways. More specifically, it lets the series tackle them without getting self-serious.

Because think about it: Every week on this show, somebody dies, and usually in a freaky way. In a realistic drama, this would have serious consequences, a la Law & Order or Six Feet Under.

And by now, we’re used to shows like like that. We have standard responses to lurid TV death.

But how do we respond when a woman’s murder gets described like this?

Kentucky was twenty-six years,
three weeks,
five days,
and thirty-nine minutes old
when found stung to death
behind the wheel
of Betty’s Bees
bee-mobile.

It’s like Dr. Seuss wrote a police blotter. The same episode uses “writerly” writing to describe betrayal, abandonment, and a missing child

Keep It Moving, Sister

But it’s important to note: The show’s tone is always sincere. The rhyming dialogue and turquoise nuns are not ironic. The cheeriness isn’t a massive set of quotation marks, meant to remind us how terrible life is. Form and content are more complexly linked.

By serving harsh reality with a gentle grin, Pushing Daisies forces us to reconsider our relationship to terrible events. If Chuck and Ned can endure tragedy without losing their spunk, isn’t it possible that we can, too?

And I’m not saying the series mocks death or violence. Its characters often mourn. But even then, they stay lively. Even then, they wear colorful clothes and use clever turns of phrase. Grief is something to be acknowledged, but not dwelled upon. Maybe that can teach us something.

Of course, the show has simple pleasures, too. Last night, for instance, Chuck’s aunt Vivian (Ellen Greene) was noticing how everyone she loved had moved away or died. “Home was my haven,” she said. “Now everything there just reminds me of everything not there.”

What a beautiful turn of phrase. It captures the pain of being the one who stays behind. And yet in Pushing Daisies, a phrase like that doesn’t produce self-pity. After all, Vivian says it after leaving her house for the first time in almost thirty years. Her sadness sends her back among the living, wearing a floral-print dress.