Counterterrorism units and crime-scene investigators still clock in for work on TV, but one network in particular is convinced audiences are eager for escapism.
“I can’t watch ’24.’ It’s just depressing,” said Bryan Fuller, creator of this fall’s most anticipated series, the pleasurable and candy-colored “Pushing Daisies” on ABC. “I don’t want to see terrorism.”
Hefty ratings for more fanciful shows, and the decline and shifting emphasis of Fox’s “24,” suggest he’s not alone. Jack Bauer will fight global warming this year, but viewers may already have moved on.
Instead, magical realism is taking hold in primetime.
“Pushing Daisies” is the most different-looking pilot in years. It’s an hour full of wonder, an invented universe introduced to newcomers in fairy-tale fashion, complete with narrator. “Daisies,” which debuts in October, fits the category of magical realism alongside such recent film explorations as Tim Burton’s “Big Fish” and the French fable “Amélie,” and in the vein of literary creations by Gabriel García Márquez.
Clearly, the desire to detach is driving a recent uptick in magical stories. Distinct from sci-fi and devoid of time-travel or standard-issue superheroes, works of magical realism tend to be rooted in mundane reality but with leaps of the fantastical. Characters in “Pushing Daisies” don’t fly; they bake pies. But they live in an amped-up, fairy-tale setting.
The Lord of the Rings tales, the Chronicles of Narnia and the Harry Potter series attest to the strength of the fantasy genre (possibly to be joined by this weekend’s “Stardust,” another fairy-tale movie about a quest in a magical realm packed with A-list stars such as Michelle Pfeiffer and Robert De Niro).
“Pushing Daisies” plants an overarching mystery at its core, then romps around a love relationship with a fantastical (metaphorical?) overlay: Mild-mannered Ned has the ability to bring his childhood sweetheart back to life.
He loves her, she loves him, but if he touches her again, she dies. In fact, by the rules of this universe, anything dead that he touches comes back to life, but if he touches it again, it dies for good.
The show’s creator is already talking about Saran Wrap kisses.
Lee Pace (“Wonderfalls”) as the well-intentioned pie-maker Ned, and Anna Friel (on Broadway in “Closer”) as his oddly named girlfriend Chuck, are adorable in the roles.
Deflecting a question about the script’s underlying allusion to celibacy, Fuller said the dilemma is really about intimacy.
Like a sunny version of “Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events,” the distinct universe created here is rooted in reality, with heightened, oddball elements, blurring the line between the actual and the fantastical.
“Daisies” is light and bright, self- consciously so, but it’s not all sweetness.
The tone, Fuller said, will strike a balance between sweetness and “a little bit of darkness, but darkness not in any way that is too morbid or depressing.” There will be murders for Ned and Chuck to solve, but they’ll be closer in style to “Beetlejuice” than “CSI.”
A number of shows this fall will deal in fantasy. NBC and Fox have time-travelers in “Journeyman” and “New Amsterdam,” the CW has an imaginative dramedy titled “Reaper” in which the devil is prominent, NBC has “Bionic Woman” – but “Daisies” is the most light-hearted of the lot.
Todd Sodano, who teaches in Syracuse University’s television-radio-film department, believes the emotional aftermath of 9/11 has played a significant role in the recent surge of fantastical/magical stories on television.
“Stories and plots imbued with escapist fantasies have become more prevalent. They’re fresher … but also safer,” Sodano says.
Beyond the fact that they provide an escape from an uncertain world, Sodano suggests, “the escapism we are seeing on broadcast television is also an escape, perhaps, from having to try to tell the stories that the cable networks are unafraid of telling.”
That is, the broadcast networks can’t match the “edginess” of Tony Soprano the mobster, Tommy Gavin the firefighter or Dexter the serial killer of HBO, FX and Showtime. So magical realism is a smart alternative.
Like “Desperate Housewives” and “Ugly Betty,” two other series on ABC that successfully serve hyper-
colored, escapist and mostly sweet entertainment, “Pushing Daisies” is a break from television’s thrillers, cops, secret agents and terrorist cells.
If it clicks, phantasmagoria may be the new dramedy; fairy tales may be this year’s serials.
While the network likes to call “Daisies” a procedural with a closed-end story each week, that’s just a marketing ploy to ease viewers weaned on “Law & Order” and “CSI.” The creator rightly nails the series as a fairy tale.
“We can use that style of the fairy- tale show to tell thematic, metaphoric stories,” Fuller said.
His early influence was “The Twilight Zone,” he said.
“That was a show that went to all sorts of different places and never felt the obligation to ground it in our reality but told stories about characters – most of them were one-act plays that had fantastical elements.”
Because they are less afraid of the word “procedural,” ABC is pumping the show that way. Still, the network seems to have found a defining style in magical realism: Escapist, artfully directed fairy-tales with distinct, bold looks. From the brilliantly colored offices of Mode magazine on “Ugly Betty” to the eye-popping palette of Wisteria Lane on “Desperate Housewives,” to the storybook landscape of “Pushing Daisies,” they’re banking on the audience’s desire to disconnect from grim reality.
Director Barry Sonnenfeld (“Men in Black”) said the color palette is “saturated,” intentionally cranked off the normal scale.
“Daisies” goes so far as to use a narrator – Jim Dale, the famous voice of the Harry Potter audio books – to emphasize the surreal storytelling style. The cast is overloaded with Broadway talent, namely Kristin Chenoweth, Ellen Greene, Swoosie Kurtz and Anna Friel.
“There is something a little bit theatrical, I think, about our show. It takes place in the real world, but a very special version of the real world,” said producer Dan Jinks. And, yes, these musical theater pros may sing at some point.
Following “Heroes” cue
Social anthropologists may surmise why, with Americans tracking the security code levels and with an unpopular war dragging on, now is a good time for escapist entertainment fare.
Pragmatic television programmers have their own solid reason: “Heroes.”
NBC’s hit “Heroes” – the only true ratings standout from last season – features a man who can fly, a cheerleader impervious to bodily harm, an artist who can paint the future and a Japanese-speaking geek who can time-travel, among other super-powered characters. The comic-
book style and ongoing mystery registered with audiences, particularly younger audiences, last year and spawned separate universes of online fan sites and interactive (brand-friendly) spaces.
This year, NBC is clustering a batch of fantasy fare on a single night. Mondays will be a three-hour fantasyland with “Heroes” anchoring two new escapist dramas, “Chuck” and “Journeyman.”
Geek-secret agent, time travel
“Chuck,” created by Josh Schwartz (“The O.C.”), is a likable action-romp about a computer geek accidentally transformed into a secret agent when he unwittingly downloads secret government files into his brain. “Journeyman,” starring the great Kevin McKidd (“Rome”), is a less appealing drama about a San Francisco newspaperman who is shocked to find he time-travels.
The three shows together are geared to the young male viewers who are difficult for advertisers to reach and so are particularly lucrative for broadcasters. Expect massive promotion of the NBC fantasy three- pack during Sunday football telecasts.
They owe more to super-powered comic books and graphic novels than to magical realism and fairy tale. “Ugly Betty” (adapted from a telenovela) and “Desperate Housewives” (from Mark Cherry’s fertile imagination and memories of his mother) and “Pushing Daisies” (Fuller’s fevered brain) all embrace a romantic, nonliteral and mostly optimistic world.
J.R.R. Tolkien, the author of “The Hobbit” and the “Lord of the Rings” series, once wrote that the appeal of fantasy writing is that it can bring the reader into a world that is at once normal and rational yet utterly strange. Besides offering pleasure, Tolkien suggested, fairy tales allow the reader to review his or her own world from the perspective of a different world.
Isn’t that what television fantasies always have done?
Vision took off
At the network level, where programming is less about nuances in tone and more about ratings, ABC may have stumbled onto escapism at the right moment.
“We didn’t set out to do a show about magical realism,” ABC Entertainment president Steve McPherson said. “Bryan Fuller came in with this incredible vision for the show and this amazing script. Then, having Barry Sonnenfeld able to execute and deliver beyond our wildest expectations. … We set out to do a show about the fantasy of a guy who has a simple ability to bring people back to life. Bryan Fuller’s imagination took it from there.”
The public may be less enthused about a show preoccupied with death and dying. Fuller hopes to convince them that it’s a positive, spiritually informed series.
“I don’t think you can look at death without looking at life, because it’s kind of the punctuation to it,” Fuller said. “It really informs everything that’s come before it, even though it hasn’t come yet. So I think there’s something very magical and mystical about death, and I would say I’m much more of a magical and mystical person than a morbid person.”
Viewers will judge the magic and mystery for themselves beginning Oct. 3.
TV critic Joanne Ostrow can be reached at 303-954-1830 or jostrow@denverpost.com.
