Q&A: 'Pushing Daisies' man talks 'Heroes'

Pushing Daisies was arguably the most promising new series of last season. A clever conceit, fairytale visuals and quirky storytelling ticked all the boxes necessary to get the critics fawning and the viewers hooked. But in a cruel twist, the writers' strike vanquished the show's steam, cutting the first season short at just nine episodes. As the series gears up to return to the air, creator Bryan Fuller fills us in on the story so far - and gives his opinion on the recent performance of Heroes.

How did you come up with the idea for the show?
"I had created a show a few years ago called Dead Like Me, which is about a young girl who dies and becomes a grim reaper. She was touching people and claiming their lives, so the inverse of her ability occurred to me: somebody who could touch and give life back. I thought he would be an interesting foil to this character. But halfway through the first season of Dead Like Me, I left that show to create a show called Wonderfalls, where I met Lee Pace (Ned), so I put that idea in the back pocket. A year or two later I went into WB TV and pitched Pushing Daisies."

Is it hard to maintain the show's unusual style?
"I don't think it's tough to do, because the writing staff I have assembled is pretty fantastic. Everybody gets the voice of the show. We're constantly coming up with ideas for odd stories and characters you wouldn't normally see on television. It's easier than you'd think when you put an orange cone around what's already been done. It becomes a clearer path to follow when you know what you don't want to do."

You've had a few scenes where the characters break out into song. Would you ever go all the way and do a full musical episode?
"When we cast Kristin Chenoweth (Olive), Ellen Greene (Aunt Viv) and Anna Friel (Chuck), who all have amazing voices, I was like 'we have to do a musical episode'. The network liked the idea of us doing a musical episode, but not in the first twelve episodes. Doing the individual music numbers - we've done three in the first nine episodes - was motivated by me not waiting to see these characters break out into song. The way we do it is more sort of Moulin Rouge; taking a song that's already been done and re-imagining it for the context of our characters and story. It feels like that's more our trademark, as opposed to a complete episode."

How often will you do the musical numbers going forwards?
"Every two or three episodes we'll have a song. Kristin Chenoweth, who's the cat's PJs, came up to me and said 'I want to sing 'Eternal Flame' by the Bangles. So we're going to do that. There are definitely going to be more musical interludes!"

Have you planned the development of the show beyond the current season?
"Yeah, especially after season one was [disrupted] by the writers' strike. I have rough arcs for the characters for the first three seasons, so I'm hoping that if we go for many seasons, the ideas for seasons four and beyond will occur to me before we get there!"

You were part of the creative team behind the first season of Heroes. Do you think the criticism of season two was fair?
"I think one of the things that was so special about the first season was these characters discovering their abilities. The central metaphor for the characters was very clean and clear: you have the indestructible teenager; the single mother who has so much on her plate she needs two personalities to take care of it; the arrogant politician, so arrogant he could fly. In the second season it felt like that the central core to those characters was re-examined in a way that maybe lost a little bit of its heart."

Where do you think they went wrong?
"I think one of the problems was there was a redundancy to some of the stories in the first season. I worked on Star Trek for five years and one of my frustrations with that show was the magical 'history eraser' button at the end of every episode, so you didn't have any sense of serialisation. In Heroes season two there were a lot of things that weren't taken advantage of, such as the Niki character. Ali Larter's an amazing actress and as much as I loved the new characters, I missed a more thorough explanation of what was happening to the characters I'd grown attached to in the first season."

What do you mean by "redundancies"?
"In the first season we broke up the characters so that each writer had a different character and wrote for that character for all the episodes. I was primarily writing for Claire so I became very attached to that arc. Hayden Panettiere is such an amazing actress - she could read the 'phone book and it would be watchable - but it seemed like that the Claire-HRG relationship was going over familiar territory in the second season. I felt like I had seen those scenes before and so Claire's story suffered from redundancies."

Pushing Daisies season two begins in the US in September and will air on ITV1 early in 2009.

Additional reporting by Nick Levine

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