Pushing Daisies used quirkiness to bridge time and queer history

polygon.com:

It all begins with a touch. While Pushing Daisies’ first episode, “Pie-lette,” establishes the tricky rules of its Pie Maker’s (Lee Pace) powers of reanimating the dead (his dog, then his mother), creator Bryan Fuller also arranges its narrative, aesthetic, tonal, thematic, and emotional ingredients, at once precise — like baking! — and yet open to spontaneity of creative ingenuity. Fuller’s beloved, but short-lived, stylistically multi-hyphenated show has received much praise for its affective acrobatics. But less is said about how the show intentionally drew a close proximity between life and death, a technique rooted as much in a sense of episodic tension as it is in its relationship to pastiche and parody, and pastiche’s relationship to modes of queer art making.

And with the show’s recent availability on HBO Max during the COVID-19 pandemic, the show is able to bridge the specters of its subtext and the contemporary space it can be watched in. Which is to say everything’s touching each other, from its procedural framework to its screwball sensibilities to its absurd quaintness, and in delicate ways, as if their life and death depended on it.

Critics clocked Pushing Daisies for conjuring a “Tim Burton-esque world” and its debt to Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie; but little connection was made during the show’s 2007-2009 run between Fuller’s inclination to draw from these and other sources as something directly connected to a queer sensiblity. Pushing Daisies is a show that is nestled comfortably in a kind of fantastical artifice: adult characters and situations drawn in children’s book colors, inhabitants bursting out into song, cartoonishly made up corpses, arch jokes and on-screen gags, and a gentle, but propulsive