"Pushing Daisies" will be screened Thursday, Aug. 16 at 8 p.m. at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, 6000 Santa Monica Blvd. in Hollywood. The show is one of sinister whimsy, a Grimm's fairy tale starring Lee Pace as a man named Ned who runs a pie shop and has the peculiar ability to, with a single touch, resurrect the dead. A second touch, however, returns the resurrected to the Great Beyond. That caveat becomes extremely important when Chuck (Anna Friel), his childhood crush, is murdered on a cruise ship - Ned brings her back to life to ask her who killed her, but she doesn't know, so she offers to help solve the crime, but anyway, it's not like Ned could ever have put her to death again.

She's still sweet on him, too, so Fuller has created the biggest, most fanciful case of fictitious unrequited love pretty much ever. "Pushing Daisies" is demented and sweet simultaneously, an impressive achievement that has critics worrying whether the show can maintain its unique tone on a weekly basis.

Your Mayor chatted with Mr. Fuller, and he explained that initially, the show - which is being billed as a "forensic fairy tale", with Ned and Chuck (joined by Chi McBride as a private detective) solving crimes weekly - wasn?t originally intended as a procedural.

"We said, 'We will give you the procedural world, if you'll give us our characters' world' ", Fuller said, adding that reinforcing the procedural element "gives us a backbone to tell a story on, plus we get our idiosyncrasies in the crime-solving arena."

Initially, Fuller said, "It was going to be a little more romantic. There were not necessarily going to be crime stories in every episode. But there wasn't a chasm between what it was and what it became, more like a little rope building a bridge between the two concepts." He calls "Pushing Daisies" "'Amelie' meets 'Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.'"

Fuller said that after creating some well-loved but little-watched shows ("Dead Like Me", "Wonderfalls", the latter about which he said, "So many people (at Fox) liked it and we got great support, but what it came down to was the supporters went to their offices and shut their doors because their boss wasn?t a supporter of the show"), he's learning to pick his fights.

"I learned on 'Dead Like Me' that you don't have to fight every battle", he said. "Television is hard - it's a crazy, stupid job, and you need support from the network if your show doesn't find an audience immediately. I'm kind of growing up a little bit - I understand that my ideas are not always the best ideas. and when my ideas need work."