I’m sure you know that ITV1 skipped Dummy, the second episode of Pushing Daisies, and went straight to the third, which they showed last Saturday. Because I’m frightened of missing something – even in a show I wasn’t sure about – I decided I needed to see episode two and started to watch it… um, somewhere.

It was so incredibly irritating that not only did I not finish watching it, I couldn’t even bring myself to watch episode three. But I decided to give the show one last chance, last night…

This week’s episode featured a hijacked plane crashing into a tall building. I know. No, don’t say anything. I know. And the shot – the shot of a hijacked plane crashing into a tall building – was shown more than once. Call me over-sensitive – and I know it’s been seven years – but as the show went on I found that I the though of planes crashing into buildings, hijackers, and dead people eroded my ability to care about Ned, Chuck and Olive, let alone the pigeon Ned brought back to life and which Olive then used as an excuse to visit Chuck’s aunts.

Because last week, Olive – who works at The Pie Hole and is in love with Ned – discovered that Chuck’s aunts think Chuck is dead, causing Olive to assume that Chuck faked her own death (because of course Olive doesn’t know about Ned’s talent for bringing the dead back to life) and vows to expose her.

There was some stuff about a windmill and some diamonds, but I couldn’t bring myself to care, swinging as I was between thinking about 9/11 and trying to work out why this show annoys me so much. I think I worked it out.

First let me just tell you about the scene that made me turn off episode two: Chuck opened Ned’s fridge and said something like, “There’s not much in your cheesebox.” The narrator then explained, with the use of flashback, that, due to Chuck’s aunts predilection for cheese, Chuck had referred to a refrigerator as a “cheesebox” until she was 20. Or something. And it belaboured the point much more heavily than I did there. It was just such a pointless quirky detail for the sake of quirky detail that it annoyed the hell out of me.

And that’s the problem with the whole show. It wasn’t that someone had a fabulous idea about a man who could bring the dead back to life – no, Pushing Daisies was created because a bigwig at ABC wanted a TV show with the quirky quality of Amelie and so show creator Bryan Fuller came up with a *pie-maker* who can bring the dead back to life; a bee-keeping, Japanese-speaking, dead childhood sweetheart; cheese-obsessed, one-eyed, bird-bejewelling aunts; a singing waitress; a sensitive dog; Emerson Cod and “Boutique Travel Travel Boutique”. It’s like he stuck his hand into a bumper bucket of quirky ideas, picked a few out and then thought, “In for a penny…” and emptied the entire bucket all over the script, dotting all the i’s with hearts for good whimsical measure.

There’s no passion behind it. It’s inauthentic and artificial, contrived and cynical. And I’m surprised at how angry it makes me.

Incidentally, having read about it on the interweb, the scene I’d been looking forward to the most was Kristin Chenoweth singing Hopelessly Devoted To You. After deciding that me and PD had come to the end of the road, I looked it up on YouTube. It was in Dummy, the second episode that ITV1 chose not to show.

Watch it here and note how the narration at the end kills the scene stone dead. Ironic, no?