Hooray for Hollywood-- Raiffa S.

Since this is a blogpost and Mr. Logsdon does not grade for content I’m going to take some creative liberty with this post. Mostly because I’m pretty sure this prompt was the basis for an essay we wrote for Mr. Lentz freshman year and it was a lot of work.

So this post is neither about a movie nor a director.

But about the TV shows Pushing Daisies and Hannibal created/written/executive produced by Bryan Fuller. He’s written a few other shows such as Wonderfalls but these are the only ones I’ve seen and possibly his best ones (I say quite biasedly).

These two shows are quite similar but also radically different in many ways but before we get to that its probably important that I give a quick overview of both the show.

Pushing Daisies (as I usually explain it) is essentially the fairy tale version of Psych. It focuses around Ned the Pie maker who has the strange ability to wake the dead with a single touch. But another touch and the person goes back to dead. If he keeps the dead thing alive for more than a minute then something else must die in its place to maintain the status-quo. In the show he goes around with a private investigator waking people, asking them who killed them, and collecting the reward but things become more complicated when he finds his childhood sweetheart and decides to keep her alive and around.

This show could be really dark if it wasn't for the adorably awkward Lee Pace as Ned, the fun narrator recapping events passed at the beginning of the episode, and the whimisical fairytale qualities that are common throughout the fullerverse. A lot of saturated yellow and green and colorful shots.

Hannibal is more of the opposite of Pushing Daisies. It is a psychological thriller, horror, procedural kind of show. It follows Will Graham, a (recluse) with an empathetic disorder that allows him to empathize with a killer and recreate a crime in his mind. It follows his dark adventures with the FBI and his regular conversation/appointments with the terribly manipulative and everyone’s favorite artsy cannibal, Hannibal Lector. This show was based off the characters from Red Dragon and Silence of the Lambs.

In both shows Bryan Fuller uses similar lighting and camera techniques, and some kind of filter/color saturation to give each scene a different feel. If Pushing Daisies wasn't so colorful and bright that would be one messed up show. Which is how Hannibal is. The dark colors make you feel upset while watching it and then in like every episode Will Graham looks psychologically tortured. Its incredible to see how Fuller can make 2 radically different tones in these shows with the same kind of techniques.

Honestly this is turning more into a “hey you should watch these shows!” so I’m going to stop rambling. But definitely watch these shows because they are so smart in how they twist your mind and just how everything connects and then Pushing Daisies is cute beyond compare.