It was touch and go, wasn’t it, with all these reports that ITV was to ditch the much heralded Pushing Daisies because of poor performance. You can also add to that poor scheduling and dropping episodes willy-nilly (remember that ITV decided not to show episode two of the show because it only had a certain amount of weeks to play with before Euro 2008 started and dominated the weekend schedules for a month. Simple solution - start Pushing Daisies one week earlier maybe?). For such a hyped show it only got a fair-to-middling critical response (as well as viewing figure response) and didn’t seem to be all that good anyway. However, there were small pockets of cult following - most noteably The Sun’s TV editor – so when I read on The Guardian’s website this morning that it had been picked up for the second series, I was sort of surprised but sort of wasn’t.

It’s quite a big deal for ITV1 this, because it was the first peaktime US import to be shown on the channel since Millennium back in the mid-1990s (anyone remember Millennium?). To be fair, it looked as though Pushing Daisies would be going the way of that ill-fated X-Files-style nonsense – it attracted a decent 5.7million on its launch but then dipped away alarmingly to two million by the time the series had finished.

The Guardian quotes an ITV acquisitions man: “It brought us viewers who don’t ordinarily come to us and added colour to the schedule. We are really pleased we got the show.”

The second series starts in the US in the autumn, so expect it to hit our shores early-ish next year. It’ll be in a primetime slot once again.

To read Our Keris’ reviews of it go here and here.