WATCH PUSHING DAISIES!!!

it's ok. i blame myself. maybe i just started my campaign too late. did i watch the little piece of heaven that was arrested development from the start? yes. yes, i did. but did i start imploring everyone i know to begin watching the greatest comedy in the history of television from the very start? no, because i was an idiot. because i loved the show and no one else was talking about it, it felt like my own little secret. i used the same retarded logic that some music elitists (myself, at times, included) subscribe to when they find an indie band on some obscure label that rocks their world. it would make sense for them to share the musical goodness with all their friends. encourage them to go buy the cd in the hopes that the indie band will make enough money to make another record. but, that's not how we do it. we keep the band to ourselves and then wonder why we never hear from them again (r.i.p. - bearvsshark, mu330, link 80, any band on asianman records, etc.). and that's how i was with arrested development. finally, it become too much and i wanted to talk about it with folks. how funny it was. how laugh-a-minute it could be. but i ran into a problem. people had kind of heard of it, but no one had seen it. if they had, it was only the commercials that ran very randomly on fox. and then it went away...because of me.

but not this time. not with pushing daisies. i start my solicitation today, two days removed from the series premiere. please, PLEASE give this show a chance. why, do you ask? what is it? it's a fairy tale. it's edward scissorhands. it's romantic. and sad. and clever. visually, it's quirky and beautiful. it's playful. it's smart. it's all of these things, all at the same time. and quite to my surprise, it was the best hour of television, lost excluded, that i have ever seen. i had this feeling of joy and anticipation from the very first scene and it lasted throughout the entire episode. in short, the story is this. our hero is ned. and ned has a unique gift/curse. he has the ability to touch a dead person/thing and bring it magically back to life. he discovers the gift as a child and, through practice and loss, learns the rules of his gift the hard way. the hard way, it turns out, is that the second touch to someone/something once dead will return it to the next life. as an adult, he learns that his childhood sweetheart has tragically met her end. he goes to the funeral home with the intent of learning how and why she dies, but when he wakes her, his heart takes over and our ned cannot convince himself to touch her a second time (which ned usually does after learning how the deceased met their end so that he and his partner may then collect whatever reward may be waiting for such information).

and that decision, the decision to let a girl named chuck be "alive again" raises the romantic question that i assume will be the lifeblood of the series. what would you do if you could not touch the love of your life? could you do it? could i do it? for the sake of the heart and the life of this show, for the sake of this post, i am going to say yes.

i guarantee you this. if you watch the first episode of this show (i am sure you can find it online), you will come away feeling that you can. that if you saw that one person, that one love of your life and nature always placed an invisible wall between you and your chuck, it wouldn't matter. you could still see their smile. hear their voice. share their company. and that would be enough.

you should watch pushing daisies.