Don’t just take our word for it.

The folks at AOL TV have named Pushing Daisies the best new show of the season. Check it out:

Pushing Daisies creator Bryan Fuller shared a whopping piece of insight with Playbill.com recently:

Lee Pace almost didn’t portray Ned.

Originally, the new series “was going to be a spin-off of Dead Like Me. Then I left, halfway through the first season, to do Wonderfalls, which only lasted four episodes.”

However, that series starred the Pushing Daisies male lead, Lee Pace, for whom Fuller wrote the part of Ned.

“His agents declined, but his manager went around them, and told [Pace] that he should really read the [pilot] script,” Fuller said, saying Adam Brody was next offered the part of Ned, but “he was not looking to do another series immediately.” relates Fuller.

Fortunately, Pace’s manager got involved - and the rest, soon enough, will be TV history.

We were already in love with Pushing Daisies before it premiered.

But now that we’ve checked out this NBC promo, focusing on the relationship between Ned (Lee Pace) and Chuck (Anna Friel) and set to the theme music of Love Actually?

Well, Wednesday, October 3 cannot come fast enough!

Move over, Paul Reubens. Another well-known guest star is coming to Pushing Daisies.

Jayma Mays - of recent Ugly Betty and Heroes fame - will be appear on the fourth episode of our new favorite show.

She’ll play “Elsita, a woman who leads a life of windmillery (she lives and works in a windmill),” according to E! Online.

Sounds like fun to us.

As if we weren’t excited enough for Pushing Daisies already, along comes this news:

PeeWee Herman himself, Paul Reubens, will guest star on the series. He’ll portray Alfredo Aldarisio, a traveling homeopathic antidepressant representative/salesman. Sounds about right to us…

Check out a picture of Reubens on the show now.

Count The Chicago Sun-Times among the numerous publications singing the praises of Pushing Daisies. Here’s part of the article from that newspaper…

When Ned was a boy, he ran with his dog in a field that looked for all the world like a painting of three colors: blue-blue sky, yellow-yellow daisies and green-green grass. It was Utopia.

Curious to Ned, he developed out of nowhere a rare gift/curse. If he touched dead creatures once - his mom, his dog, a fly - they’d spring back to life. If he touched them a second time, they’d die again forever.

Pushing Daisies follows Ned as an adult piemaker, along with Chuck (a woman who’s the love of his life), plus their detective partner Emerson. They find corpses, Ned resurrects them to find out who killed them, then he kills them again.

That is the literal breakdown of Pushing Daisies. But the magic of this procedural, romantic fairy tale is in the brush strokes, not the frame.

In Hollywood-speak, it seems like Amelie meets Tim Burton, although director Barry Sonnenfeld, who is responsible for the tone, bristles gently when people say this since, well, he’s Barry Sonnenfeld.

Many scenes look sumptuously saturated in colors. Some shots are composed like postmodern and surreal pictures. Pushing Daisies debuts October 3, but it’s already garnering better buzz from critics than any other new show this fall.

It works on its most important level, as a twisting tale about lovable goofballs, told with lovely images and crisp dialogue.

When Ned (Lee Pace) sees his childhood crush Chuck (Anna Friel) for the first time in years, he awakens her from death and falls in love with her all over again.

“I guess dying is as good an excuse as any to start living,” Chuck says.

But because his second caress would kill her, Ned and Chuck may never kiss or touch each other again. Their sober-eyed partner Emerson (Chi McBride) views their love as tragic and as a bit of a business encumbrance.

Follow our link to read the full article on this ABC show.

Here’s some breaking news. Literally.

E! Online has confirmed that Kristin Chenoweth, the beloved Broadway superstar who is a series regular on ABC’s much buzzed about new series Pushing Daisies, slipped and fell at home down a concrete staircase and fractured a few ribs.

Sources say the actress is recovering and is even determined not miss a minute of the show’s production schedule.

However, producers have insisted on moving around a few scenes in order to give her as much rest as possible.

We wish her a speedy recovery!

Pushing Daisies may be easier to watch than it is to describe.

In a medium that thrives on the cut-and-dried, the new ABC fall series is part romantic fantasy, part comedy and partly a whimsical take on crime-solving.

And it concerns itself with death, or rather, undeath: Its hero, Ned (Lee Pace) — a pie-shop owner who can bring the dead back to life with a touch of his finger — helps a detective solve murder cases by interviewing the victims. One of them, it turns out, is his childhood sweetheart, but their love must remain unrequited. If he kisses or even touches her again, she’ll die for good.

“I always feel so stupid, like I’m not doing the show justice, when you try to say, ‘I play Ned, who can touch dead people and bring them back to life, but if I touch them a second time, then they die. And if I keep them alive for more than a minute, then someone else will die,’” says Pace. “It makes it sound like CSI with a twist. It’s a really tricky one to describe.”

Therefore, ABC would just as soon not bother.

“Certain people are going to tap into the procedural (murder story) and love that, other people are going to get swept away in the romance, some people will like the magical realism elements or the comedy of it, and hopefully some people will love it all,” ABC Entertainment chief Stephen McPherson says.

Due Wednesdays at 8 ET/PT starting Oct. 3, this ABC comic drama is a visually stunning fairy tale: colorful, life-affirming and dripping with cinematic flourishes, courtesy of creator Bryan Fuller and director Barry Sonnenfeld (Men in Black).

In a new season full of more shows about cops, lawyers and sexy doctors, Daisies is a genre-busting standout, already embraced by many critics as the best of the freshman crop, but labeled by just as many as a hard sell.

Marketing the show to viewers is “definitely a challenge,” says the network’s promo chief, Mike Benson, “but for us, it’s really about selling the magical romance of the show. We’re really trying to sell an overall feeling rather than trying to make them understand exactly what it’s about.”

Continue reading this article …

Fans of Boston Public and The Nine know Chi McBride as a portrayer of stand-up citizens.

They may need to readjust their focus on Pushing Daisies, however, as the actor takes on a more nuanced, less ethical role.

McBride describes Emerson Cod, his character on this hyped new show, as follows: He’s a private investigator who uses Ned’s powers to help collect reward money.

“Emerson only cares about two things: ‘I gotta get paid and I gotta go home,’ ” McBride says. “He’s a character of questionable morality. But you will see that’s a veneer for something that happened that was very painful in his life.”

That Pushing Daisies marketing campaign must be working.

So far, the pilot that’s been screened by critics is receiving rave reviews. Here’s a sampling:

• TV Guide’s Michael Ausiello claimed that “ABC has found its next Lost!”
• Variety touted Pushing Daisies as”"the fall show with the most spring buzz.”
• New York Magazine also delivered praise, calling it “funny, imaginative and smart,” while claiming it “boasts Gilmore Girls-speed wit.”

We’re certainly sold! We can’t wait for the Pushing Daisies premiere on Wednesday, October 3 at 8 p.m.