The Premise
Bryan Fuller's 2007 ABC series stars Lee Pace as Ned, a pie-maker who can bring dead things back with a touch. There are rules: a second touch puts them back down, and if he lets someone stay alive past a minute, someone else drops dead nearby. He teams with gruff PI Emerson Cod (Chi McBride) to wake murder victims, ask who killed them, and split the reward. Then he wakes his childhood sweetheart Chuck (Anna Friel) and can't bring himself to touch her again, so they date without ever touching. Kristin Chenoweth is the waitress at his pie shop who's in love with him. Jim Dale narrates the whole thing like a bedtime story.
The Case For
The look. Production designer Michael Wylie built a saturated Amélie-meets-Roald Dahl storybook world, and the pilot was directed by Barry Sonnenfeld, which set a tone every subsequent director had to match. Lee Pace does something genuinely hard here — he plays a man too sad to touch the woman he loves without ever making it maudlin. Chi McBride's deadpan is the load-bearing beam that keeps the show from floating off into cotton candy. Chenoweth got an Emmy for this, deserved it, and the writers knew enough to give her at least one full musical number a season. The dialogue moves at old-Hollywood screwball speed. Jim Dale's narration lets Fuller pull off exposition that would strangle a normal procedural.
The Case Against
It's twee. If you have any allergy to whimsy, the narrator alone will run you off inside ten minutes. The murder-of-the-week structure is the weakest layer — the mysteries exist to get Ned to the corpse, not to be solved, and if you want a real procedural you'll be annoyed. The visual palette never varies; every episode looks like the same music box. And it was cancelled after 22 episodes thanks to the 2007 writers' strike, so the second season limps to a stop rather than lands. You're watching an unfinished show.
Who It's For, Who'll Bounce
For you if you liked Amélie, Wes Anderson before he went fully symmetrical, the Sonnenfeld Addams Family movies, or Fuller's later Hannibal on the strength of its images alone. Also for anyone who wants a fantasy romance where the obstacle isn't a misunderstanding but actual physics. Bounces the CSI crowd, anyone who finds narrators smug, and viewers who need a show to finish its sentence — this one gets cut off mid-thought.
The Ruling
WORTH IT because the craft is doing the talking. Fuller has a thesis about grief and touch and hope, and instead of writing a monologue about it he built a rule system, cast an actor who could carry the ache without saying it, and hired a production designer to make every frame feel like the inside of a Fabergé egg. The show never pauses to explain what it means; it trusts you to read the pie. Pacing gets loose in the middle stretch of season one and the cancellation robs the back half of a real ending, which is why it's not the top tier. But an ambitious swing that mostly connects and dies young is exactly what WORTH IT is for.