Pushing Daisies to Go Six Feet Under?

Ladies and gentlemen, start your letter writing campaigns! A day after NBC announced the cancelations of My Own Worst Enemy (yay!) and Lipstick Jungle (boo!)--and a week after Fox doomed Joss Whedon's Dollhouse to an early grave with a Friday timeslot — ABC has moved one step closer to dropping the axe on Pushing Daisies. While nothing is official as of yet, the speculation is that the just wrapped thirteenth episode will be the series' last. Creator Bryan Fuller has promised that he'll continue the show's storylines on in comic book form if Pushing Daisies is eventually buried. (Sorry, we couldn't resist.)

We're never happy to see people lose their jobs, but Pushing Daisies is a show that irritated us to no end. Its mere existence ruffled our feathers; overly twee, impossibly earnest and stylized to within an inch of its life, Pushing Daisies was quite possibly one of our least favorite television shows to air in the last decade. Still, people loved it and will certainly meet its demise with groans and websites and clenched fists pointed towards the air. And we can't blame them. While Pushing Daisies had pretty poor ratings for ABC — it has averaged only 6.6 million viewers this season — it would have been one of the highest rated shows on NBC's entire schedule. By comparison, Knight Rider gets roughly a million less viewers per week and it got inexplicably picked up for a full season. Questions must be asked: why is one show deemed a success and the other a failure? And why doesn't NBC co-chairman Ben Silverman add a canceled Pushing Daisies to his own network? We hear he's got a few openings available...