About halfway through “Dummy”, I fell in love with Kristin Chenoweth. And Digby the dog.
I’m starting to get a good feeling about this show, and that became clear the moment that Chenoweth’s Olive Snook brook into song, spontaneously singing “Hopelessly Devoted to You” to express heartache over her inability to snag the attentions of Lee Pace’s Ned. But it wasn’t just the fact that Pushing Daisies gave us a musical number in the middle of its second episode, it’s the fact that it did so in such an idiosyncratic fashion, with Olive being interrupted several times and freezing up in embarrassment for her excessive keening, only to resume at the earliest opportunity. Kristin captured perfectly that sense of humiliation so many of us have felt at one time or another over being caught exposed and vulnerable in front of the wrong people. In a series so quirky and twee (I love that word!), it was a remarkably down to earth moment, and its insight into basic human nature was an unexpected answer to earlier criticisms that Pushing Daisies might be a bit too bubbly for a show so rooted in painful, complicated and seemingly insurmountable problems, like not being able to touch someone without killing them.
