Third-episode verdict: Pushing Daisies

The Carusometer for Pushing Daisies0 Anti Caruso

How sweet is your tooth? How much do you like whimsey? Me, I’m pretty sweet-toothed and I’m on first name terms with most of the local squirrels*, but despite all the love and hugs being heaped on it by all and sundry, I’m finding Pushing Daisies just too cloying and sweet. And there are no talking animals.

It’s not that it’s not nice, or well directed, or well written, or well acted, because it’s all of them. It’s a very well made piece of clever television.

It’s simply too much of a fairytale, too much like eating a gallon of caramel in one sitting. Maybe I’m getting on a bit, but the children in The Sarah Jane Adventures seem to have more maturity than the adults of Pushing Daisies, who make Scrubs‘s JD seem like Methuselah. I could maybe watch one of these a month, and they’d all make reasonably good movies. But every week? No thank you, I’m making room for the savoury course.

Of course, sweet things are addictive so I might change my mind. But although there’s a lot of love ?– a lot – going round, I’m just not feeling the love for Pushing Daisies.


All the same, The Medium Is Not Enough has great pleasure in declaring Pushing Daisies is the first ever programme to score a 0 or Anti-Caruso on The Carusometer quality scale. An Anti-Caruso corresponds to “a programme so good that if it were placed in the same room as David Caruso, the two would annihilate each other, leaving behind just the faintest sound of a sigh of pleasure.”

* I probably shouldn’t have shared that with you

Author

  • Rob Buckley

    I’m Rob Buckley, a journalist who writes for UK media magazines that most people have never heard of although you might have heard me on the podcast Lockdown Land or Radio 5 Live’s Saturday Edition or Afternoon Edition. I’ve edited Dreamwatch, Sprocket and Cambridge Film Festival Daily; been technical editor for TV producers magazine Televisual; reviewed films for the short-lived newspaper Cambridge Insider; written features for the even shorter-lived newspaper Soho Independent; and was regularly sarcastic about television on the blink-and-you-missed-it “web site for urban hedonists” The Tribe. Since going freelance, I've contributed to the likes of Broadcast, Total Content + Media, Action TV, Off The Telly, Action Network, TV Scoop and The Custard TV.

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