Everything is still coming up 'Daisies'

Last fall's most charming, original TV series is still this fall's most charming, original series.

"Pushing Daisies" remains magical, gorgeous to look at and, well, downright screwy. And it's still about the most fun you can have watching network TV.

If you missed the writers'-strike abbreviated first season — there were only nine episodes — don't for a moment think you're too late to join the party. Tonight's second-season premiere (7 p.m., ABC/Ch. 4) quickly resets the "Pushing Daisies" premise.

It's a "forensic fairy tale" about Ned, who discovers as a boy his touch can bring people back from the dead. If he touches the person again, that person is permanently dead. But if he doesn't touch them again in a minute or less, someone else will die.

Grown-up Ned (Lee Pace) makes the world's greatest pies by touching dead fruit and giving it everlasting flavor. When private investigator Emerson Cod (Chi McBride) accidentally learns of Ned's talent, they partner as murder investigators. Ned touches the victim and asks who killed him/her.

But when he brings Charlotte "Chuck" Charles (Anna Friel) — the girl he loved as a child — back after she was murdered, he can't bring himself to touch her again. They're in love, but they can never touch again.

Creator/executive producer Bryan Fuller said the abbreviated first season "allowed us to get out of the weeds and look at the horizon."

"It felt like last year, we were pretty contained to a small world," Fuller told the Deseret News. "And this season is all about kind of expanding that world."

Which means, first off, that Chuck's Aunt Charlotte (Swoosie Kurtz) and Aunt Vivian (Ellen Greene) get out of the house. And last fall's cliffhanger — that Charlotte is really Chuck's mother, not her aunt — immediately plays into this season. As does the whole thing about Chuck returning from the dead and having to keep that a secret from her aunts.

Chuck is trying to live the life she never did the first time around, having been so totally sheltered. And Olive Snook (Kristin Chenowith) — tired of being burdened with everyone's secret (and secretly in love with Ned) — checks herself into a nunnery. Really.

"Looking at the first few episodes, there's a lot of crazy (expletive) happening," Fuller said.

It's like the funniest, most colorful carnival ride ever. Hop on board!

"DIRTY SEXY MONEY" also returns for its second season (9 p.m., Ch. 4), and it's another show that builds on the promise of its abbreviated first season.

This comedy/soap opera is about idealistic lawyer Nick George (Peter Krause), who becomes the family lawyer to the fabulously rich Darlings, whose wealth is exceeded only by their outrageousness.

Without getting specific, somebody dies in tonight's episode in a rather unusual fashion. Which is a problem for the Darlings.

And, in the closing moments, there's a shocking development.

Although the two shows have, well, nothing in common, "Dirty Sexy Money" is about as much fun to watch as "Pushing Daisies"

---

E-mail: pierce@desnews.com