I've been meaning to get this on the blog all day. Been one of those days. Anyway, the DVD will be out on Sept. 16 — therefore around the time of the second season — and will have the nine episodes seen to date. DVD and Blu-ray. Since I watched the ABC HD version, with its eye-popping color, I'm anticipating the Blu-ray. Boilerplate after the jump.

“Original,” “rewarding,” “enchanting” and “clever” are some of the ways in which critics describe Pushing Daisies, the innovative and imaginative new series from Bryan Fuller (Dead Like Me, Wonderfalls, Heroes) and Barry Sonnenfeld (Men in Black), which makes its highly-anticipated DVD and Blu-ray™ hi-def debut on September 16, 2008 from Warner Home Video (WHV).

Pushing Daisies follows the charming and whimsical story of Ned (Lee Pace), a handsome, lonely, young pie maker who possesses a mysterious gift — bringing people back from the dead with his touch. The DVD will feature all nine episodes from the series’ first season, along with a bonus interactive featurette. Pushing Daisies: The Complete First Season will be available in both standard and Blu-ray™ hi-def formats. The standard format DVD will retail for $29.98 and the Blu-ray™ hi-def format will retail for $39.99.

Presented in visually stunning, storybook-like cinematography, Pushing Daisies follows the offbeat escapades of Ned, a young man who during his childhood discovers he has the ability of bringing the dead back to life with a single touch. First, he resurrects his golden retriever Digby after he is hit by a truck, and later brings his own mother back to life after she suffers an aneurism. But there is a caveat to Ned’s unusual talent. If something that he’s revived remains living for more than one minute, then something of similar life value within the vicinity will die. Additionally, if he touches the resurrected a second time, that life will die again, but permanently – a stipulation which proves to be a great strain when Ned brings his childhood sweetheart, a beautiful girl named Chuck (Anna Friel), back to life.

Ned inherits his mother’s baking talents, becomes a pie maker and opens a restaurant called the Pie Hole, which he runs with kooky waitress Olive Snook (Tony Award winner Kristin Chenoweth). The restaurant however, begins to fail financially and Ned finds an unusual way to earn money via Private Investigator Emerson Cod (Chi McBride), who accidentally discovers Ned’s gift and makes a proposal – to bring murder victims back to life in order to inquire about the circumstances of their death. After collecting the facts, Emerson solves their cases and splits the reward money with Ned.

The series also stars Emmy® winner Swoosie Kurtz and Tony Award nominee Ellen Greene, and is narrated by Jim Dale (Harry Potter audio books).

“Pushing Daisies is one of the most original and imaginative television programs airing on television today and we are pleased to bring this highly acclaimed series to DVD,” commented Rosemary Markson, WHV Vice President, TV & Special Interest Marketing.

She added, “Consumers will find themselves captivated by the show’s intelligent and witty dialogue, gorgeous cinematography, offbeat storylines and quirky but endearing characters. Pushing Daisies is sure to liven up anyone’s home entertainment library.”

Pushing Daisies originally premiered October 3, 2007 on ABC and has recently been picked up for a second season. The show earned three Golden Globe Award nominations, including Best Television Series – Musical or Comedy, Best Performance by an Actor in a Television Series – Musical or Comedy for Lee Pace and Best Performance by an Actress in a Television Series – Musical or Comedy by Anna Friel. The release of Pushing Daisies: The Complete First Season is timed to the second season premiere of the show on ABC.

From Living Dead Guy Productions, The Jinks/Cohen Company in association with Warner Bros. Television, Pushing Daisies is executive produced by Dan Jinks & Bruce Cohen, Barry Sonnenfeld, Bryan Fuller and Peter Ocko.

DVD Special Features Include:

Pie Time – Time for Pie – An interactive featurette with creators of the show, the set designer and special effects team who all come together to make this show so unique. Special interviews from creator Bryan Fuller and Lee Pace as they discuss their favorite first season scenes.

I'll post at greater length when I am done watching tonight's episode. But after seeing Molly Shannon being attacked by the birds, I couldn't help but think of how much they'd made her look like Tippi Hedren even before that scene. But for some comparison, here's a publicity photo of Hedren in "The Birds."

Great fun to see friends/collaborators Mike White and Molly Shannon working together again (among other things, he directed her in "Year of the Dog"). I would have liked to see more of them but apparently we'll have to settle for her alone. But she is a pleasure, and she fits in with the weird-but-still-kinda-real characters in the show.

Ned the Pie Maker's confession at the end threw me some. But it does fit in with his ongoing attempt to achieve real intimacy with Chuck. The physical is a constant compromise, so the emotional connection has to be without compromise. Hence the confession. And the show nicely set it up with Olive's longing for the traveling salesman — for her own uncomplicated, direct, emotional and physical link to someone, even if it's not Ned.

Other good stuff: the salesman's monologue about love and Olive's unsatisfied reaction to it. Shannon/White scamming the Pie Hole gang with her feigned stutter and anger. And my favorite thing: Olive's chat with Chuck, especially the line "I can be a very good resource for you on Ned if you don't mind me clawing out your eyeballs while we talk."

Maybe it's the Broadway geek within, but to have Kristin Chenoweth and Ellen Greene singing together on "Pushing Daisies" was simply a kick.

By the way, Ann V. in the comments below noted that it was a They Might Be Giants song. (News to me. But if you want to talk about the new Robert Plant/Alison Krauss collaboration, I'm ready.) So here's a video of They Might Be Giants' version …

And, since I'm in a full video frenzy, here's the "Pushing Daisies" version:

Getting back to the actual TV show, it continues to improve, once again going into the emotional territory involving its core gimmick …

The hand-holding business worked well when Chuck imagined she was holding hands with the Pie Maker, not so well when the show got around the problem with the bee suits. I know there's a love-conquers aspect to the show, but it's finding an awful lot of ways to let its lovestruck duo make contact — and the plastic wrap was much funnier than the bee suits.

But it's beginning to feel as if I'm with this show for the long haul, however long that may be.

If nothing else, I am more satisfied with it than with "Heroes," which continues its slide into tedium. This week's episode, with the much ballyhooed arrival of Kristen Bell, should have been an opportunity to impress the Bell cult when it checked in.

But Bell's moderately amusing villainy aside, it wasn't much. I mean, if you've acquired the power to learn anything you see being done, wouldn't you want a more rigorous test than jumping rope? (I kept thinking of Claire's tests in the first season. That was proving your power.) And it was pretty quickly evident that Nathan and Parkman were fighting each other; based on how they looked afterward, they did surprisingly little damage to each other, too. And they should have brought Hiro home by now. I'm hanging in with "Heroes," but with less and less enthusiasm.

My big reservation with "Private Practice" had to do with some of the obviousness in the plots. The teen girl's sexual claims sounded a bit fake from the beginning, we knew that the return of Violet's ex was going to go bad and it was immediately clear that the assault victim's injuries went beyond what she first said. (On that last plot, too, I'm still uneasy with the idea that the woman who has been assaulted is supposed to be strong for her upset-by-the-attack man. I don't like the suggestion that the man's problem is more serious than the woman's.)

But the show wasn't entirely unwatchable. The Bill Clinton monologue was pretty amusing, for one thing. Addison is toughening up. The characters' interaction makes more sense. Sam and Naomi talking as parents was a nice touch.

I think I mentioned last week that "Back to You" is figuring out how to be funny, and Fox apparently thinks it's doinf all right. The network has ordered 11 more episodes, on top of the 13 already commissioned, for a full season of 24 telecasts.

Since I was watching other stuff (as should be obvious from this post), I did my laptop thing for the World Series last night. Even there, it was stunning, especially in that sequence of three run-scoring walks. And no commentary, and no commercials — other than the ones we were fast-forwarding through in the shows we watched.

Sometimes people have to stop talking fast and let themselves feel something.

Last night was one of those where I just ran out of steam, managing to get through only half of "Private Practice" before sailing away on Lethe. But before that I did get through "Pushing Daisies" and was not entirely displeased. …

I've already expressed my reservations about "Pushing Daisies" being too cute for its own good, so it was nice that last night's episode let itself get serious for a bit. That Chuck finally learned that her new life came at a price, and that the others had to acknowledge their willingness to pay that price. It was a somber note, but it was one that the show needed to hit if we were ever going to accept the characters as something other than amusing little caricatures surrounded by bright colors.

Of course, the show soon enough went back to being cute, but I hope that last night's episode was a promise that, while it will never be realistic, it will at least recognize the need for real emotions — and not just the wistfulness in which it has often trafficked.

On the other hand, did I miss it or was there a dead end to the plot about the happy drops in the aunt's pie? I don't remember a noticeable change in the characters, or in Olive for that matter.

This morning, having caught up on sleep, I took a few minutes to watch "Back to You" and saw a show that is really beginning to figure out what works. Part of that, naturally, is more Fred Willard. But it also gave Kelsey Grammer and Patricia Heaton stronger business involving their characters, underscoring their flaws but doing it by putting them in fun situations. I don't buy Grammer's last good turn for his boss, but overall this was the best episode of the show so far.

And don't forget tonight's season finale of "Mad Men." I expect to have a post after it airs.

The scene that persuaded me to watch "Pushing Daisies" at least once more.

(You know, after listening to Chip Caray declare "Here come the Yankees" too many times, it was kind of nice just now to hear Joe Buck punctuate a Cleveland rally with "Here come the Indians." But that's not what I'm here to talk about.)

I think it's "Mad Men" fatigue. That show was so good, other hours are having a hard time measuring up …

To start with the show that has the video selection above, "Pushing Daisies" is just too cutesy — and painfully slow because it is so busy being cute, and sometimes just not all that cute. (A burly guy who knits. Not too inventive, that.) Yet the whole Kristin Chenoweth/"Hopelessly Devoted"/dancing-with-the-dog segment was indeed amusing and sweet and charming. If the show could feel more like that more often, I might begin to enjoy it. As it is, that bit was, as I said at the beginning of the post, enough to get me back one more week.

I don't think I have another week of "Dirty Sexy Money" in me. Not that I hate it. More that I am just bored by it. The show certainly tries, and it's wittier than the old prime-time soaps that it both recalls and gently parodies. But the plots and schemes just do not interest me. If I was trapped in a mountain cabin that only got one channel, and the only show on that channel was "Dirty Sexy Money," and I was snowbound, and I had absolutely nothing else to do, then I would watch it and not mind very much. But I'm not likely to devote more DVR space to it.

I didn't hate either "Private Practice" or "Grey's Anatomy" this week, and I suppose that's a sign of improvement. That, or I was watching at a point when I was too tired to get emotional. In any case, "Private Practice" moved along without excessive offense, though it didn't give me any big reason to come back, either. I'm still waiting for some sign of the old Addison, and this week just found her squishy-soft again.

As for "Grey's," my feelings are more complicated. I see hints of the old "Grey's," of humor and of good character interaction. But there's still the Izzie Problem. She's a terrible person and a worse doctor. Her treatment of the old guy, and the business with the tubes, were still more proof that she shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a patient. As for Alex's slagging of George, unless I missed a moment where he realized that Izzie and George are together again, it just seemed petty and jealous. To be sure, that's the old Alex. But that Alex was put aside last season and the beginning of this one, so a sudden and public re-emergence of his old self felt out of character. But "Grey's" modus operandi is people going out of character.

I do like "House," but this week's was pretty blah. I think the finding-a-new-team thread has gotten pretty thin, and none of the new characters work as well with House as the old ones did. And we've seen House confronted before about faith-vs.-medicine, and this confrontation didn't add anything.

The Foreman scenes had some oomph, because they showed Foreman trying to be the anti-House — praising people, for goodness sake — but having to fight his own, inner House. And when he took a House-like risk, it bit him in the backside. The only way he is going to be the doctor he wants to be is while working in a place that tolerates the antics of his mentor — and, so, presumably would tolerate someone else acting the same way.

But it's not "Mad Men."

Premieres tonight on ABC.

Maybe I should just shut my pie hole about this show…

I have seen the considerable enthusiasm among some of my colleagues for "Pushing Daisies." I have also read the discussion of applying the word "twee" to it. ("Twee," which I looked up to be sure, means "affectedly clever. … mincingly cute or sweet.") I am probably closer to the "twee" crowd than the enthusiasts, but I'm still largely on the fence about the show overall.

"Pushing Daisies" is a magic-laden, Dickensian-narrated, "Addams Family"-looking, oddball of a show about love, death, intimacy, murder and being photographed from very peculiar angles. Its main character has the power to bring people back to life, but there are strings attached — strings that may lead to others' demise (as in the lovely, gone "Carnivale"), strings that keep him from getting close to the very people he has cared enough to help.

In some hands — Joss Whedon comes to mind, as well as "Carnivale" — this could be the stuff of tragedy, or romance with an overlay of sadness. But "Pushing Daisies" — from Bryan Fuller and Barry Sonnefeld — treats it as wistful comedy, keeping the audience at some emotional distance, notably via Jim Dale's narration. Actors like Lee Pace and Chi McBride are playing it cool and then some. It's as if the show's makers don't want to touch us either.

But what they do aim to do is dazzle us, with a colorful visual style reminiscent of comic books and Sonnenfeld's previous work (including "Addams Family" and "Men in Black" on the big screen and the live-action "The Tick" and the revival of "Fantasy Island" for TV). And dazzle they do. While I would stop short of the extravagant claims that you've never seen something like this on TV ("The Tick" was also pretty elaborate visually), "Pushing Daisies" nonetheless puts the vision back in television. You can't just follow along with the dialogue. You have to watch the screen.

But when you watch and listen, you may still come back to, well, "twee." This is a show that is not content to be clever. It is self-consciously so. It's not content to let you recognize that it's interesting. It cries out, "See how interesting we are! Be impressed!" It doesn't just want to be pinky-out elegant; it's making pinky circles in the air so you'll notice.

None of which will keep me from coming back for a second episode. But it does make me watch the show skeptically, and that skepticism will make me harder to impress in future shows.

On the other hand, I really liked Sonnenfeld's "Addams Family," "Men in Black" and "Fantasy Island." So maybe "Pushing Daisies" will push me off the fence — to a good side.