Pushing Daisies finally canceled

Well, my fears have been realized – the brilliant ‘Pushing Daisies’ has been canceled. Am I suprised? Not really. How many good shows really make it anymore with the outdated Nielsen system standing at the ready with a guillotine? The mere fact that it doesn’t factor in the folks watching with DVR should make it more than apparent that it needs to be abolished or at least seriously re-tooled (to borrow a phrase from the tv biz). With ‘Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles’ recent move to Fridays, I’m waiting for the axe to be dropped there at any moment. And though I really like ‘Life On Mars’, I suspect it will suffer a fate not unlike the similarly themed ‘Journeyman’.

What’s adding salt to the wound is the fact that shows like ‘The Bachelor’, ‘Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?’ and yes, the new and completely unimproved ‘Knight Rider’ manage to stay on the air. In fact, ‘Knight Rider’ is an even greater ratings failure than Daisies, yet NBC is going to the effort of ‘re-tooling’ the show by firing several castmembers and fiddling with the plot to make it more of a hit. Yeah, because that always works. If a show is having that much trouble and it’s barely into its first year, it does not bode well for future installments. I know a lot of people disliked David Eick’s reboot of ‘Bionic Woman’, but compared to ‘Knight Rider’ that show was Shakespeare (and at least we had Michelle Ryan too look at).

The only good thing to come of this is that creator Bryan Fuller is rumoured to be returning to his former post at ‘Heroes’ – a show desperately in need of his attention. In fact, I’ll go so far as to say I don’t even think Fuller could help ‘Heroes’ at this point, as it has fallen so very far from its first season glory. I didn’t want to give up on ‘Heroes’, and I even tolerated the middling second season. But this year, oi vey! Someone fell asleep at the consistency wheel, because the characters are subject to wild personality changes from one episode to the next (and sometimes within the same episode). I’ve struggled to sympathize with anyone this year. Claire is an obnoxious brat, Peter is an ineffective dolt, Sylar suddenly has the hots for Elle, HRG is nowhere to be seen, Mohinder is a selfish jerk…it’s like they took everything good about the show and chucked it out the window in favor of cramming in even more characters. Ali Larter is completely wasted as some sort of clone of her previous character, except that this one is less interesting and more annoying. Oh and she freezes things. Or at least she used to. Now she just makes ominous phone calls.

Grrr. As you can tell I’m really annoyed at all this. Of all the shows to be canceled, I’ll miss ‘Pushing Daisies’ the most. It was a glorious fairytale saturated in the brightest of technicolor, with smart writing and interesting characters. I’ll take a ‘Pushing Daisies’ or ‘Mad Men’ over ‘Dancing With The Stars’, ‘Estate of Panic’, ‘The Bachelor’ and the million other reality shows that everyone seems to go crazy for any day of the week.

Coldplay – Life In Technicolor [From Viva La Vida]