Couch Tomato: 'Daisies' Dukes, 'Amazing' Goths

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Express' Arion Berger hits the high and low notes of the week (so far) in television.

NOTE: The shows described below have already aired. If you've Tivo'd or DVR'd any of them, you will be spoiled.

"Pushing Daisies" (Wednesdays, ABC)

I tried, folks, I tried. The brilliant minds over at Tifaux.com think it's the greatest thing since the pie slicer and who am I to argue?

Anyway, thanks to ABC.com's full episodes (with limited commercial interruptions, which exploit the dull-witted and absent-minded by making you actively "click here to continue" after Snuggles the Dryer Bear has had his say), I caught up with a few episodes of this adorable, cuddlesome, snooky-wooky-frookie of a death-centered gruesitcom.

And I still hate it.

How arch is this thing?

It makes Laurence Harvey look like Robert Mitchum?

And it's sooo cute.

It's a six-year-old girl with sausage curls in a poofy satin party dress digging her widdle index fingers into her dimples, so lovable is she. There isn't a moment, a character, a setting — The Pie Hole; you're kidding me, right? — a line, a set detail that isn't as quirky as Tim Burton's staging of "Napoleon Dynamite: The Musical," starring Michael Cera and featuring the music of the Squirrel Nut Zippers Orchestra conducted by Danny Elfman.

The worst part is hearing the beloved Jim Dale narrate the thing in his fairytale voice; what a comedown. Plus, I never liked that Kristen Chenowith. Also, Barry Sonnenfeld in a raffish mood makes me want to put my foot through the screen. Too, the music is very, very, very whimsical.

Fortunately, "Pushing Daisies" doesn't need me. It loves itself far more than I ever could.

"The Amazing Race" (Tuesdays, CBS).

This show continues to astound. I can catch up on writing about it as we're still only into the fifth epi, and some of the most vivid characters are still around to be picked off, sweaty, mud-covered and culture-shocked, by a dapper Phil Keoghan. He's so sexy when he says, "You're the last team to arrive" and makes that regretful little moue.

Of the two sets of "We're-gonna-use-our-bodies-to-get-what-we-want" teams, one got knocked out early, so we were left with only Shana and Jennifer to not be able to tell apart until last weekend. Then they got the boot in Lithuania, which for some reason sounds like a particularly depressing place to get the boot in, although I'm sure it's lovely.

That left a lineup of the good, the bad and the eh.

Nate and Jen have the kind of mutually mistrustful and vindictive relationship that allows each side to pour poison into the love-well, as it were, and say the un-take-backable to each other over ... Every. Little. Thing.

Ronald spent one episode treating his daughter Christina like crap, while she tried to 1) graciously ignore him and get on with the challenge and 2) talk him down from his tree with out getting upset. It was sad to watch, but he seems to have pulled up his socks since.

That's really it. Everyone else is pretty likable, including the nigh-unbeatable brother-sister team of Azaria and Hendekea, and beanpole Nicolas and his adorable grandfather Donald. At right is a photo of Donald jumping over a muddy ditch somewhere in the Netherlands. No, the rules did not require than one strip down to one's skivvies. That was Donald's decision, and long may he, uh, wave.

My favorite team is that of Kynt and Vyxsin — I know! I know! Just hear me out — whom the other teams call "The Pinks." I don't care about people having weird names (pot, kettle, etc) or even about people who choose to weird up their names, unless it offends passersby or startles the horses. But these two Goth kids — she hulking; he slender like the bending reed — work together with respect and patience, encourage one another and indulge in stoopid puns like, "Oh, my Goth, we're late." They're kind to the locals and acknowledge that pink hair, fishnet armings and black lipstick may not be the most common sight in, say, Ouagadougou, and they appreciate how kind others are to them.

What's really impressive about these two is — well, aside from the fact that they brought a lot of makeup on the road — that they seem like actually interesting people, and usually anyone who lets their clothes and hair express who they are don't have much underneath.

Except, presumably, PVC scanties and a couple of tats.

But they made it over the muddy ditch without showing us, so we'll never know.

Next week:
It's all BBC America all the time, dahlings.

Photos courtesy ABC and CBS