Why Pushing Daisies Still Deserves Flowers

Mental health and Pushing Daisies, because I can.

Gemini season is over (sad) and what that means is that I turned 37 this month and was at my peak Gemini power. I love my birthday, but it usually is followed by a slump of oof I had an unreasonable to do list for this year and I got to some, but not all, of it, so now I am sad.

And that brings me to television! The first time I watched Pushing Daisies, I was having a depressive episode, the sort where you can’t get out of bed and do anything except drag yourself to school (I was in college at the time) and work, which involved late nights at a college newspaper with a competitive and in many ways toxic environment, and then also some other nights and most weekends selling expensive hiking shoes and flannel to people who never acted like the your-LLBean-boyfriend tumblr*.

I worked hard, both physically and emotionally. I was almost able to pay for all of my rent and my car and my food, in the way that no one warns you will happen when you’re barreling toward graduating from college with boatloads of student loans AND credit card debt from that almost of just trying to make it.

I see a lot of people lately talking about no one writing for the money, one of the evergreen hot takes that pops up every so often on social media, which is why I’m going to make a point of mentioning this. I worked as a public school teacher. I am married to a journalist. Daycare for two kids in a DC suburb was almost as much as my take home pay. I’ve been working just to barely scrape by literally since I was old enough to get a work permit, so don’t ever come at me with that “do art just for the joy of it or you’re not a real writer” shit. That is for rich people. Maybe one day that will be me, maybe not, but until then, please pay me for my art, which I love deeply,  so I can dig myself out of the debt of living and put food on the table for my kids, and so that I CAN KEEP MAKING ART. Thank you very much. 

Back to the depression. I know lots of people who feel this differently, in the literally can’t get out of bed, but I have never really had a safety net of the sort that would allow that, and I don’t know why, but even in the face of epic mental break down, I will go to work and stuff down my sadness and put on a happy face and get the day done, and then get my kids through their afternoon and evening before I collapse. 

I’m saying all this because I have heard people share (with good intentions, I think) that real depression is not being able to function at all. I believe that is how it works for some people, but for me, it is about switching certain emotions off and locking them away, and then managing to convince myself that because of that, I am somehow even more alone than everyone else who feels alone. Sometimes it is about shutting emotions off so much that I have panic attacks or frustrated, angry, concentrated hard crying jags. Fun stuff. 

Anyway, the first time I saw Pushing Daisies, I loved Ned so much because he felt like me; kind of desperately alone but also kind of not? At times so incredibly happy that his world is literally done in brilliant, vivid technicolor, but also deeply sad and lonely despite getting up and going through the motions. I read somewhere once that the show is both bright and dark, and fuck if that isn’t exactly how I feel about it, but also exactly how I feel about me, and my brand. Bright and dark. Spooky and sparkly. Effervescently happy and also overwhelmingly devastated. 

Sadboi Ned, played by Lee Pace, from Pushing Daisies 

Also, perhaps egotistically, I have always thought that I was maybe extraordinary (wild because when I wasn’t thinking that, I was thinking that I was nothing and I deserved all the hardships and more). Ned realizes he isn’t like other children, but before he realizes this, I think he already feels it. He has a gift, but it’s kind of weird. I honestly thought my reading and writing and imagination was my gift, but I also knew what it was to crash in a friend’s basement or side room for just a few months for the family to get back on its feet, and what it was to be really, truly, hungry.

I also worried that my otherness was not about being extraordinary, but about being extra ordinary, if that makes sense. Forgettable. Disposable. Unimportant, which as an adult I understand better, because so much of the US government, judicial, and legal system is set up on the premise that people who are poor, and especially homeless, do not count. This is a lie. But it is a convincing lie, especially to a child, when it is backed by an entire national persona. And for that reason, for many, childhood is a somber thing. And for other reasons it is, it’s super sad for young Ned. And then for adult Ned, played by the brilliant Lee Pace. 

While it’s true that, like any person with eyeballs and a brain, I love Lee Pace for his acting chops and his entire vibe, what I love him for most is embodying this character who weirdly on screen, despite having a family wealthy enough to send him to boarding school as a child and literal death powers, made me feel that we had an awful lot in common.

This is all in the first episode of the show, and then we also learn about Charlotte, or Chuck, played by the incredible Anna Friel. She can’t see the world because she takes care of her shut-in aunts so she reads voraciously to experience the world, and god, that felt like me, too. I still feel like this a lot, honestly. Reading to see the world and watching other people enjoy it. And then when she dies the very first time she does go somewhere, that was deeply ironic and depressing and horrible, but then she gets brought back to life by the boy who loved her as a child, except they can’t touch because if they do she dies again. This is the whole premise of the show, which is kind of complicated as far as premises go, but gosh the writing is brilliant and so again, it is ALL SET UP IN EPISODE ONE, and then on top of that the episode is called Pie-lette, because it’s set in a pie shop and because maybe the universe decided that I, a girl who was struggling and loves puns, needed this gift. 

Plus, they have Kristen Chenoweth in the cast and Ellen Greene and they know what to DO with them; there are random moments of song, not every episode, but enough that you get to see it happen in episode two, Dummy, which is my all time favorite episode of a TV show ever (the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode “Once More, With Feeling,” gives it a run for its money though, and it has not escaped my notice that I adore musical episodes of TV shows). By the way the premise of Dummy is that an evil, money obsessed car manufacturer making ultra modern weird looking cars is hiding that the cars explode and gosh, idk, does that sound familiar? 

Anyway I literally love Pushing Daisies S1E2 so much that I was like, now that I’m going through a wave of intense depression (having kids & postpartum is a serious business for people with tricky brains) again as an adult, I’m going to write an entire book and call it Hopelessly Teavoted to You, and make it inspired by ALL of the oddly specific little things I like, including S1E2, but also including many many books and movies and shows that all made me feel seen in that way where a character (or sometimes a place!) felt horribly sad and vividly happy all at once. That title has since been changed to Hopelessly Teavoted, but I made my own punny-tea-shop happysad novel. I DID IT. And I’m terrified because it’s 100% entirely fiction, but in that way that fiction so often does, it tells a lot of truth about the dichotomy, the weird juxtaposition of me and my whole identity. 

A very lucky thing happened to me, and in the 6 elementary schools, 2 middle schools, and 2 high schools I attended, I always had wonderful reading and writing teachers, especially in high school. I had this ninth grade English teacher** (he was why I studied journalism and English, and then taught HS English for 15 years) who joked that I always walked with a literal pep in my step (fine, I get excited and sometimes awkwardly walk/bounce down hallways at a pace half way between normal and “dash” on a video game). And I did! I feel like when I’m happy, and also sometimes when I’m masking particularly well, I am effervescent. But I am also often deeply deeply sad. The world is on fire, people care more about whatever thing makes them feel superior and in control than about other people suffering, and in many things, we are often isolated when we should be a village. And then sometimes when we do form a village, that’s insular, too. Humans are weird. 

Lee Pace (Ned), Anna Friel (Chuck) and Chi McBride (Emerson) in Pushing Daisies. Look at the vibes of this found family; I mean, impeccable. No notes. 

But then that’s the beautiful thing about Pushing Daisies, because it allows Ned to be brutally lonely—and flawed! And authentic—and also to have this wonderful found family in his pie shop and his private investigation partnership, and his dog and his childhood-to-current beloved. I felt like the entire show was saying it’s OK to not always be OK, to not always be glowingly happy, and to still be happy.

And then there are also moments of just pure joy—like Ellen Greene saying it’s brave to try to be happy, which absolutely confirms that all we can do is try, and then singing “Morning has Broken” in the rain, which I kid you not, literally played in my head the day my book finally sold. 

Ellen Greene, as Aunt Vivian on Pushing Daisies. Interestingly, like the original Aunt Viv on the Fresh Prince, she’s in my bank of all time favorite side characters. Do I just love characters named Aunt Vivian? Who knows. 

Even more consequentially, the characters are allowed to be unapologetically human. Even though it’s extremely speculative in nature, it feels real. There’s a moment when Ned tells Olive that it’s not that he’s never thought about her like that, that he’s not never been interested, and you get a sense that for them it really is just the timing! And you’re still rooting for Ned and Chuck! But I so rarely see this done in tv or film, that a character isn’t just like, ah this one person is my absolute soul mate, and instead they’re kind of like, yeah, there could have been other people! Great people! But it just wasn’t the right time and ultimately just won’t happen. I love this and I respect the hell out of the writers for doing it in a way that did not feel creepy or like a betrayal. It just felt like a person, in love, being honest about the fact that love doesn’t magically delete all the other crushes and important moments we had, even in a world that ACTUALLY has some sort of magic to it. 

Anyway, the times I have felt the lowest, Pushing Daisies has been there for me, and then I also moved on to watch (though it actually came out earlier!) Dead Like Me, and because I was horribly stressed while on sub, and then because my grandmother was dying after I announced my book, I wrote the wait, and in conclusion, though it lives only on my hard drive, I also have a grappling with grief and loss Roy-Kent-in-a-Cemetery as an unlikely grim reaper meets a magical baker trying to find her grandmother’s gravestone recipe romcom. One day, Zoe and Max. One day.

And if you ever read my writing, I hope you like the idea that grief and humor can exist side by side, as they so often do in real life. I hear a lot of talk about what constitutes good rom coms and good writing, and this can be depressing—like did you know that some people think if you read and write fast, it’s garbage? Tell that to my almost perfect score on the content section of the English Praxis, which assesses knowledge of books and literature for teaching high school English. It doesn’t care that I can read about 150 pages a minute; it won’t accuse me of not actually reading or of skimming. And I hope that if you read my book, you won’t care that I sometimes draft a full novel in a month (and then revise for much longer!) writing quickly does not mean the writing is not done well; just as a novel that took two years to write isn’t bad because it took so long. I once took twenty years (ages 13 - 33) to write a novel, but that time doesn’t make it better or worse; the content of it does. And actually, the process of that one is what made it so important, though it died in the trenches long ago and I don’t know that I would ever return to my time looping new adult witches. 

We have this echo chamber desire to maybe believe that the way we do things is the best way to do things, and I think it is intensified by writing because in publishing ALL you can control is how you write, but that can be depressing and isolating, so I want to end on this note: Whatever your process or timeline, it’s pretty fucking impressive that you wrote/are writing/are going to write a book. Keep going, because people want to read it, and because it’s possible it’s the thing that’s keeping YOU going.  

*side note, if you don’t know the “your llbean boyfriend” tumblr and you are even at all attracted to men, you’re welcome. I once wrote a snowy romcom inspired by this, and it will probably go nowhere, but rest assured that somewhere out there, a very lucky fictional woman named Laurel Hemsworth gets a real LL Bean boyfriend named Hunter Greenwood, and yes, there are obvious smutty puns with those names, and the name of the fictional upstate NY town, etc. etc.  

**I can’t help myself but list the English teachers that guided me to books that were, as the great Professor Rudine Sims Bishop recommends, windows and mirrors and doors. In high school, Mr. Bayne, Mr. Alford, Mrs. O’Connor, Mrs. Vasholtz. In college, so many professors, but especially, Professor Mary Helen Washington and Professor Verlyn Flieger at the University of Maryland, College Park. These people shaped me as a writer and a reader, and I think of them all often.

TREAT YO’ SHELF to what I’ve been reading lately: 

Whenever You’re Ready by Rachel Runya Katz, which is a beautifully written romance about grief. There is a dog, there is exploration of the complexity of Jewishness, there is a GORGEOUS sapphic slow burn that you will pine for, and there is this line that I won’t repeat entirely but it lives rent free in my thirsty ass head and it is “I wish I brought my….” so go read the book and fill in the blank, you’re so welcome in advance. 

Bonus Tracks: I took my dog on a 3-hour-each-way-drive for a surgery consultation, and while listening to music to kill the time, I stumbled across The Regrettes, which OMG feel like if Letters to Cleo a la 10 Things I Hate About you had a retro modern girl power heir. I would discover this amazing band, WHICH HAS A COVER OF “DANCING ON MY OWN,” among other marvelous covers and original songs, after they had broken up. That’s on brand for me. Anyway, go have a listen, and you can start with “Monday.” Then I went on a real Shaboozey kick, and am unable to stop; thank you Apple Music Summer playlists for serving me “A Bar Song” and then a ton of Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan; it’s like you saw into my summer windows down with a heart of spooky cold fall girl soul. 

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