Pushing Daisies
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Pushing Daisies is an American television comedy created by Bryan Fuller. Described as a "forensic fairy tale", Pushing Daisies is about a pie-maker who has the power to bring the dead back to life. The show premiered in the United States on October 3, 2007. The series was inspired by the French film Amelie.
Quirkiness
The distinctive visual style of the show is complemented by noticeably quirky traits in the naming of characters and locations and also in plotlines themselves.
Many characters' names are alliterative, and some have duplicate (or near-duplicate) fore- and surnames: Deedee Duffield, Billy Balsam, Charles Charles, Charlotte "Chuck" Charles, John Joseph Jacobs, and so on. This doubling up of names is also apparent in many other things (i.e. Coeur d'Coeurs, Boutique Travel Travel Boutique, Darling Mermaid Darlings), and a theme of "pairs" is apparent in episodes' plots (a pair of monkey statuettes in the pilot episode, for instance).
The distinctive storybook-esque style is continued within the overall design of the visual aspects. Regardless of the fact that the show focuses on murder investigations, the morgue is still painted in candy-cane stripes and many of the outfits worn by the characters are vibrantly colored, bright, and cheery (for example, Olive's work uniform is a lime-green pintucked dress, and Emerson is frequently seen wearing shades of purple.)
CGI is very prominent in the series, with much use of blue screen technology (the shop window, similar set pieces and outdoor scenery outside often cast a blue halo tinge) and 3d set-extensions (streets, grass and landscape, the pie shop facade). It has been criticized that due to the lack of blue hues in the background replacements, a green screen would have fared slightly better for chroma key effects. It has mostly been given a "not-quite photo-realistic" look to emphasize the storybook surreality.