Tom Maurstad

Can a TV pilot be too good? That is a common cautionary question when it comes to new shows whose concepts depend on a lot of action or high-tech trickery to keep them clicking along at a winning pace – a cop-show pilot suspiciously full of thrill-ride chase scenes and billowing-fireball explosions, or a future-in-space series brimming with dazzling sequences of intergalactic travel and holographic wonders. No broadcast network series has the time or budget to keep up that level of production.

But with Pushing Daisies, a new ABC show that has been universally acclaimed even before its first episode has aired – which it does Wednesday – you are presented with a show so good, so smart, so imaginative in seemingly every aspect, it's not a question of time or money. It's just hard to believe that anything this good can be sustained. To quote Ponyboy quoting Robert Frost, nothing gold can stay.

And Pushing Daisies' pilot is pure gold. It's also lemon yellow, and cerulean blue. It's bursting with radiant reds and glorious greens. Through the lens of director Barry Sonnenfeld, its first hour is drenched in colors, heightening the surreal nature of this show's Candy Land-like world, a view of life through a stained-glass kaleidoscope. But it isn't just the look of the show, it's the feel. This is one of those rare occasions when a show's substance matches its style.

ABC

Anna Friel and Lee Pace get ready for a magic moment in Pushing Daisies, airing Wednesday at 7.

That Tim Burton-esque style – summed up in a flashback sequence rendered in Claymation as two children, pretending to be Godzillas, smash a construction-paper cityscape full of tiny, terrorized Play-Doh people – is perfectly suited to Pushing Daisies' fairy-tale premise.

The premiere introduces us to Ned (Lee Pace), a sad but sweet young man who makes pies in his little pie-shaped restaurant. A prologue shows Ned as a happy little boy who discovers he has a secret talent – if he touches someone or something dead, he, she or it is instantly brought back to life.

This gift, as the British-accented narrator explains, comes with a couple of caveats. If he touches the newly restored again, they immediately drop dead. And if he doesn't touch them again within a minute, someone else drops dead, thereby maintaining the cosmic balance. This improbable and problematic premise proves to be the inspiration for all sorts of subtle and sublime interplay between the show's characters.

Joining Ned are the easily irked detective, Emerson (Chi McBride), who discovers Ned's secret talent and partners with him to solve murders and collect the reward; and his childhood, first-kiss sweetheart, Chuck (played with sly charm by Anna Friel).

The way it works is that Emerson and Ned go to the morgue, Ned touches the murder victim, asks the suddenly living-again person who killed them, and then touches them again. Bam, they're dead, and off the two go to solve the mystery and collect the reward. But when the murder victim turns out to be Chuck, Ned just can't bring himself to touch her twice. Reunited in reanimation, Chuck and Ned (and a disgruntled Emerson) become a crime-solving team, with each week's episode bringing a lovely new adventure – murder mysteries as silly, idiosyncratic tales.

Creator Bryan Fuller, a writer on Heroes and the man behind the short-lived but still adored series Wonderfalls, fills the script with dialogue as sparkling as the images, at times managing to be funny, sad, naive and ironic, all at the same time. And here finally is a TV couple for which the will-they/won't-they suspense has a real edge. Mr. Pace and Ms. Friel do a beautiful job of conveying their wonder at and affection for each other. But as opposed to all those other couples who had viewers waiting for that first kiss – Ross and Rachel, Sam and Diane – the first time these two kiss will also be the last since Chuck will, you know, instantly drop dead.

By the end of this first sweet slice of Pushing Daisies, you can't wait for the next. It's an anticipation mixed with the fear it can't possibly be as good as the first, and the hope that it will be.Pushing Daisies

Grade: A

Wednesday at 7 on ABC

(Channel 8). 1 hr.