When the fable of a love-struck pie maker got the green light, it seemed almost too good to be true. Since then, this prime-time fantasy has come face to face with industry reality. When last seen on the set, the cast and crew of Pushing Daisies looked wistfully ahead to a full season of chaste kisses and cherry pies.

It's an eerie thing to visit the set of a successful new television show on the last workday before a potentially calamitous writer's strike. As twilight set in on Friday, November 2, no one knew for sure what Monday would bring, but all signs pointed to a dreaded walkout.

"It's hard to focus," admits Kristin Chenoweth, who plays Olive, the salty-sweet waitress at the Pie Hole diner on ABC's Pushing Daisies. "This is probably our last day on set with the writers."

All appears calm on Stage 19 at the Warner Bros.' Burbank lot. The crew fiddle with lights and the call-outs unique to a single-camera show drift over the cavernous space: Picture's Up...Quiet, please!...Roll Sound!

But anxiety leaks out between takes. Star Anna Friel - in the red jumper and black tights of her character, Chuck - clicks the heels of her ruby shoes like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. "Click three times and the strike goes away!" she ventures, laughing.

The petite blonde Chenoweth, in a lime-green shift and flowered flip-flops, distracts the crew with cheerleading antics. Lanky star Lee Pace, who plays Ned, is notably touchy-feely, laying hugs on everyone who comes close, including the shows executive producer, Bryan Fuller. This week's episode, fittingly, is about a crisis: a mean-spirited competitor (guest star Molly Shannon) has opened a taffy emporium across the street and boldly declared her intention to put Ned's pie shop out of business.

Ironically, a real-life crisis - the looming strike - is occurring just when so much seems to have gone right for the show. Its advanced critical buzz was borne out in a big opening and solid ratings; its budget battles have been won; a back-nine order complete with the twenty-two-episode season in the can.

"We jump started a few storylines when we realized that the strike could be real," says Fuller, the shows creator. "We designed our last episode as a cliff-hanger so the audience would want to come back."

But everyone knows that if a shuts down the show, the momentum could be lost. The audience could drift away.

"It'd be an absolute damn shame," Friel reflects ruefully in her trailer between takes. "No one would get to find out what happens."

The recipe for the quirky confection that is Pushing Daisies was cooked up after Fuller pitched a handful of ideas to fulfil a pilot deal with Warner Bros. "One of them," he says, "was about this guy who could touch dead things and bring them back to life - but if he touches them twice, they go back to being dead. He falls in love with a dead girl and brings her back, but he can never touch her again."

Essentially it was a fable about impossible love, and Susan Rovner, senior VP. of drama development at Warner Bros. Television, "really responded," Fuller reports. "I was surprised at how enthusiastic she was. I thought, maybe she doesn't know what she's talking about. But she convinced me it was the idea we should definitely develop."

A number of his preoccupations take centre stage in the show, including death and the supernatural. "I have a fascination with life's big mysteries," he says. "I went to a lot of funerals as a kid. People go out of their way to make children feel okay at funerals. I remember them as being quite pleasant."

He also likes dogs, so he wrote in Digby - a golden retriever - and pie, so he made his hero a pie maker, with a workplace full of fruity treats. He explains: "When you're creating a world you may have to live in for a few years, you want to fill it with things that make you happy." (Cherry is his favourite, which may account for the Pie Hole's cherry light fixtures.)

A science-fiction and fantasy enthusiast (he wrote and produced UPN's Star Trek: Voyager and was recently a writer and co-executive producer on NBC's Heoes), Fuller takes exception when reviewers focus on the perceived saccharine sweetness of the show. He prefers to think of it as "a little subversive," as seen in some of its smart and snarky Gilmore Girls-style dialog.

"I didn't set out to write a family show," he asserts. "But if people can watch it with their whole family, that's kind of cool, because I'm still doing the show I want to do and having fun with the people I'm working with."

Those people included - at least initially - Barry Sonnenfeld. As is well known, the film director (who, as a cinematographer, contributed the memorable visual style to the Coen brothers' classic Raising Arizona) played a key part in establishing Daisies and its droll comedic tone. An executive producer, he also directed the pilot and the first episode.

"I look at Barry as creator of the show," says Fuller, who works with a young staff of ten writers. "Its visual attitude is very much Barry, and he was instrumental in establishing the characters in terms of working with the cast."

But when the controlled cinematic look of the forensic fairytale proved expensive, Warner Bros. bumped Sonnenfeld off the show in an attempt to curb costs. Budget battles were fought. Eventually, ABC stepped in and supported Fuller's contention that the show could not be done for the amount the studio had in mind. But by then, Sonnenfeld had other commitments. "We're anxious to get him back," Fuller says. "He still watched dailies and gives feedback to the cast. We're hoping he'll direct the season finale."

When the finale will be shot is, at this point, anybody's guess. As expected, on Monday, November 5, the Writer's Guild of America began its strike against the Alliance of Motion PIcture and Television Producers. Exactly three weeks later on November 26, Pushing Daisies shut down production, having run out of scripts after completing episode nine.

It took barely one episode for viewers to make up their minds about the hero of Pushing Daisies. A boyish, six-foot-four-inch actor who excels at dreamy gazes, Pace contributes much to the show's wholesome appeal.

Never mind that he first gained acclaim playing a transvestite in Showtime's tragis Soldier's Girl (he also briefly starred in another Fuller show, Fox's Wonderfalls). He hails from Oklahoma and cites his favourite pie as apple, and even in person, he seems to embody the tentative, well-meaning, bottled-up, yearning that is Ned.

Asked about his character's relationship with Chuck (more formally known as Charlotte Charles), he blushes and rolls his eyes. "It is romantic," he says, smiling. "It makes me go cross-eyed, they're so romantic."

But it's a different kind of TV romance. Because a kiss from Ned would be the kiss of death, the lovers sleep in separate beds and occasionally make out in the diner's kitchen through a sheet of cellophane.

The pitfall of the hand-off premise, Pace says, would be "to play the same scene over and over. But there are some scenes where it's actually really sexy to find yourself wildly attracted to someone you can't touch."

Friel plays that someone - the exuberant, adorable, delighted-to-be-reborn Chuck, who joins Ned and his private-eye pal, Emerson Cod (Chi McBride), in a weekly murder-solving enterprise that uses Ned's special talents.

In keeping with the show's lost-in-time tone and visual extravagance, the brunette actress enjoys a retro glam wardrobe and non-stop costume changes that would have been the envy of Audrey Hepburn or Doris Day in an earlier era.

Because of her naturalism, it can come as a surprise to discover that Friel is British - and that she made her name in weightier roles.

"I tend to play very complex, layered and rather downtrodden women," she explains in cheerful Northern English tones. She starred on Broadway in Patrick Marber's chilly romantic drama, Closer, and recently played a legendary murderess, Countess Elizabeth Bathory, in a European biopic.

How British is she? She cites her favourite pastry as shepherd's pie, the meat-and-potatoes U.K. staple.

Watching her bounce around the set of Daisies, calling colleagues "darling" and "luv", one could be sceptical when she insists that her engaging good nature takes effort.

"I base the character on my daughter," she says, referring to Gracie, her two-year-old with actor David Thewlis. "She's experiencing life for the first time. She has a wonderment and sense of excitement. But to maintain happiness and a spirit and energy like this for seventeen hours a day, five days a week - that has been far more testing than I could ever imagine."

Friel is exaggerating about the shows hours, but only slightly. "We live here," says Chenoweth matter-of-factly. "Right here at the corner of stages 19 and 20."

It seems that each plot-packed, tone-shifting, visual-effects-laden hour takes a good deal more time to shoot than a standard weekly schedule can accommodate. "One week I had a seventeen-hour day, a fifteen-hour day and a thirteen-hour day," adds Chenoweth, who shares her much-used trailer with her white Maltese terrier. "I've never spent the night here, but pretty close."


A show-biz legality called the twelve-hour-turnaround means the block of time in which actors are on the set gets progressively later as the week wears on. On this pre-strike Friday at 9 p.m., it feels like the workday isn't even half over. Shannon, who appears in the episode as an evil Tippi Hedren lookalike, has yet to step before the camera. With everything expected to go flooey on Monday, this could prove to be the longest day yet.

Still, during break, an assistant director is happy to lead a tour of the series' striking realistic sets: the retro Americana kitchen, with its flour-dusted rolling pins; the Edward Hopperesque diner booths, in primal greens and reds; the antiques-filled lair of Chuck's eccentric aunts (played by Ellen Greene and Swoozie Kurtz). But everyone knows these sets could be standing empty by the end of the month.

"Are there any pie that aren't working?" a crew member asks a prop man, who shakes his head, disappointing her. It's hard to imagine another set in which you'd hear this line.

Around the Warner Bros. lot, other shows are sweating it out to the same ticking clock. A stone's throw away, ABC's Ugly Betty shoots an outdoor scene under blazing, high-rigged lights.

The star of NBC's Chuck, Zach Levi, pokes his head into Friel's trailer to say hello, then dashes back to work.

Passing by the trailer and safely out of character, Pace sweeps Friel into his arms and waltzes her around the tarmac. "I know what we'll do if there's a strike," he exclaims. "We'll go on Dancing with the Stars!"

But Friel can't shake her concerns. She, Thewlis, and toddler Gracie have been settling into their house in the Hollywood Hills, and the show represents the chance for some stability. "It seems that you never finish anything in this kind of life," she laments. "You buy your house and you start your garden and that never gets finished."

A production assistant bangs on the trailer door, interrupting conversation for the umpteenth time. "You see," she says, laughing, "you have five minutes to do something and then you stop! You never finish a phone call - you never feel that you finish anything." She continues talking as she's led away. "So this show, this trailer, becomes a place of safety, because you know your routine here. It's so familiar, it starts to feel more like home than home does."
That said she disappears on the set, with no idea of what the coming month will bring.