By Alex Strachan - CanWest News Service

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. -- Not just a green meadow but the greenest, most pristine meadow you've ever seen. Not just a red cherry pie but a pie so delicious and scrumptious-looking you can practically taste the tang of cherry beneath the flaking crust. A golden retriever that practically shimmers in the golden-hued twilight of boyhood memory -- this is what feature filmmaker Barry Sonnenfeld was aiming for with Pushing Daisies.

Heightened reality. A fantasy world that is part imagination, part reality, based on hours of painstaking production design, set decoration and creative craftsmanship.

Pushing Daisies, the gentle fable about a man-child who can bring the dead back to life with a single touch has reenergized a TV landscape riddled with TV corpses, whiny, self-involved TV nurses and doctors, and so-called reality shows.

The show's audience on ABC has ranged from nine to 13 million viewers in the five weeks it has aired so far, good enough to place it in the Top 30 in the U.S. Nielsen rankings and earn a full-season pickup of 22 episodes.

In Canada, where Pushing Daisies airs a day earlier on CTV, it is averaging 500,000 viewers a week, making it the second-most-watched new series among viewers aged 25-54, and the third most-watched among viewers 18-49, this according to CTV.

Sonnenfeld has been down the fantasy road before, with his feature films The Addams Family, Addams Family Values and Men in Black.

He co-produced the wide-eyed Jim Carrey fantasy Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, and produced a short-lived, live-action version of the cult cartoon The Tick for the Fox network in 2001.

Sonnenfeld started out as a cinematographer, collaborating with the Coen Brothers on Blood Simple, Millers Crossing and Raising Arizona, before turning to his own films.

Sonnenfeld was not looking to do TV again, he says. When he read the pilot-episode script about life, love and longing by Dead Like Me and Wonderfalls creator Bryan Fuller, however, he fell hook, line and sinker.

Pushing Daisies was different, Sonnenfeld told CanWest News Service in an interview. The moment he saw its potential, he decided to put everything else on hold.

"I had produced and directed other TV pilots like The Tick and Maximum Bob, and I didn't stick around," he said. "I moved on. I decided, if I got back into television, that I needed to stay involved with the show."

Sonnenfeld is a big believer in heightened reality. He believes in pushing saturated colours beyond the norm of what is acceptable on film and TV to create a netherworld of fantastic colours. Sonnenfeld's pilot episode, starring Lee Pace as a piemaker who pines for the girl who lived next door when he was a boy, was called Pie-lette.

By creating this heightened reality, he believes, the audience will buy into the stories' elements of whimsy and fantasy.

"My job is to maintain the tone, mainly in terms of what the actors are doing. You don't want them to get bigger or funnier. It's so easy, given these scripts, for the acting to get bigger, or not real. I'm all about putting real people in surreal situations. This show has a kind of self-indulgence, and it's very much about 'me.' The camera is constantly saying, 'Look at me, look what we're doing, isn't this cool?' It's not subtle, and it's not Protestant. It's very 'there,' and I think that's my Jewishness coming out."

Sonnenfeld initially agreed to direct two or three episodes. He has since become more involved, vetting the show's cast, including Broadway veterans like Anna Friel, Chi McBride, Swoosie Kurtz, Ellen Greene and Kristin Chenoweth, and perfecting Pushing Daisies's colour palette -- its "pie-lette," if you will.

And somewhere along the way, Sonnenfeld learned to love TV again.

"Let me tell you about television," Sonnenfeld said. "For me, I like directing movies, and I like directing television. I like Chinese food, and I like barbeque. The advantage of television is that, in any given week, you can have a great show, you can have a decent show, you can try something and fail, but next week you can have a great show again. With movies, I spend a year of my life waiting for Friday night, to find out I'm a horrible director. With television, it's no harm, no foul. If the show's no good, it doesn't get picked up."

Sonnenfeld prefers television's pace.

"The pace is much faster. It's much more energetic. In movies, you do 12 set-ups a day. In television, you do 36 set-ups a day. Same crew. In movies, you say, 'I don't know about that, let's do yet another take.' In television, you say, 'Let's move on.'"

Pushing Daisies's pilot episode was shot in 16 days, for 60 pages of script.

"If that was a feature, I would have done it in 60 days. Yet, what we shot looks to me like a feature film. I don't feel like we made any compromises."

Sonnenfeld directed the second episode, Dummy, about a car expert killed in a hit-and-run accident. Other episodes have revolved around an ill-fated romance between a woman trapped in a windmill and a convicted murderer, and a fateful horse race in which a dead jockey is found years later, alive and inexplicably taller than he used to be.

"What we're doing on the series is maintain the look, the palette, the self-conscious camera, the wonderful acting. Lee Pace is an incredibly talented actor. He's handsome. He's tall. He's smart. All our actors are great looking, incredibly talented, huge personalities. My theory of directing is basically to tell people to talk fast and flat. Lee will say, 'Oh, I get it, I should talk fast and flat because, in this scene, I don't want Chuck to realize that I'm loving her but, at the same time, nervous about her being alive. And I don't want Emerson to know I'm nervous.' And I'll say, 'No.' And he'll say, 'Well, what is it?' And I'll say, 'Just talk fast and flat.'"

Unlike his earlier series, Pushing Daisies is not going away any time soon. A full-season pickup is guaranteed, and not even an extended writers' strike may hurt its chances of second-season renewal.

Sonnenfeld says Pushing Daisies reminds him of the early days of his career, when he was shooting films for the Coen Brothers. The creative atmosphere on the set is electrifying, and it's his job to make sure viewers at home feel some of that electricity.

"I get a lot of credit for what Bryan Fuller puts on the page. The script is always a blueprint for what we do. It's Bryan's show; my job is to bring the page to life."

Pushing Daisies airs Tuesdays on CTV and Wednesdays on ABC. Check local listings for the times.