Welcome to Close Reads! In this series, Leah Schnelbach and guest authors dig into the tiny, weird moments of pop culture—from books to theme songs to viral internet hits—that have burrowed into our minds, found rent-stabilized apartments, started community gardens, and refused to be forced out by corporate interests. This time out, Alissa Burger celebrates Pi Day with a look back at Pushing Daisies and a visit to our favorite cafe: the Pie Hole.
While Alfred, Lord Tennyson notes that “In the Spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love,” as Pi Day nears, Pushing Daisies fans’ thoughts turn yearningly to thoughts of The Pie Hole. Or at least, mine do.
Pushing Daisies ran on ABC from 2007-2009, featuring the adventures of a Pie Maker named Ned (Lee Pace); his “alive again” sweetheart Charlotte Charles (Anna Friel); and Ned’s private investigator pal Emerson Cod (Chi McBride). Ned has a special gift—he is able to touch the dead and bring them back to life. There are some rules though: if he touches them a second time, they return to being dead, and if he keeps them alive for more than a minute, another being of similar life force in the vicinity dies instead (an alive again bird may come at the cost of a dead squirrel, for example, while an alive again human results in the death of a different human). Ned and Emerson work together to solve murders, with Ned touching the dead to bring them back to life and ask who killed them, so he and Emerson can solve the crime and collect the reward money. On one of these visits to a local funeral parlor, the dead girl Ned finds lying in the casket is his childhood best friend and sweetheart Charlotte Charles (also referred to as “the girl named Chuck”) and once he brings her back to life, he can’t bear to let her go again. Thus begins a complicated choreography of sharing their lives together and loving one another without ever inadvertently touching, hiding Chuck’s return from her aunts Lily (Swoozie Kurtz) and Vivian (Ellen Greene), and navigating the complicated triangle of affection between Ned, Chuck, and Olive Snook (Kristin Chenoweth), a waitress who has a crush on Ned, becomes friends with Chuck, and struggles with keeping the heaps of secrets she learns along the way.
At the heart of Pushing Daisies is The Pie Hole, where Ned bakes and sells his pies. The Pie Hole occupies the ground floor of a multi-use building with apartments on the floors above, including those where Ned, Charlotte, and Olive live. The facade of the building that faces the street corner is curved and the awning that overhangs The Pie Hole is a three-dimensional stucco pie crust. Inside The Pie Hole, the arches and curved architectural details further this pie crust imagery: crossing the threshold of The Pie Hole is like walking into the warm, welcoming embrace of a pie itself and being nestled between its two crusts. These arches and circular imagery are a common feature of The Pie Hole, which has round windows, a tiered circular display of pies, a half-circular upholstery pattern on the booths, and a wide, wooden, half-circular diner-style bar. Bringing together the circular patterns that abound in The Pie Hole and the fruit that fills so many of the Pie Maker’s delicious pies are the hanging light fixtures: red globes of cherries, complete with green stems.
In addition to the curved arches and circles that welcome the visitor into The Pie Hole, its color palette is warm and vibrant. The outside of the building is painted in bright yellows and greens, with an art deco-style torch and a vertical marquis that reads “Liberty” on the torch’s handle. The Pie Hole’s walls and chairs are painted a bright green, with red and gold trim around the windows, and warm gold accents in the wall sconces and the railing that fronts the bar. The tiled floor of The Pie Hole is made up of alternating squares of different shades of green. These bright hues and the life they symbolize stand in stark contrast to the cupboard full of rotting fruit in the Pie Maker’s kitchen, which he touches to bring back to life to bake into his pies.
The costuming of the series—particularly that of the female characters—also bursts with colorful life. Olive’s Pie Hole uniforms are retro-styled dresses in pin-striped warm oranges and greens, while Chuck wears brightly colored dresses, hats, and shoes. In both the restaurant and the lives that take place within it, The Pie Hole is a liminal space between life and death, where what has been dead becomes beautifully, vibrantly alive again.
The Pie Hole also symbolizes home, though the meaning of home differs from person to person. For Ned, The Pie Hole is the only home he knows and one he has had to create for himself. As a young boy, he learned some of the rules of his gift the hard way when his mother died and he touched her to bring her back to life (his first use of this power). Ned’s obliviousness to the trade-off rule results in the accidental death of Chuck’s father and to make matters even worse, when his mother goes to kiss him goodnight that evening, she dies again. Ned’s father sends Ned away to boarding school, where Ned sneaks down to the school kitchen to bake pies, a process and smell that reminds him of his mother and assuages his loneliness and yearning for the home to which he can never return. The comfort of this moment becomes the foundation for his livelihood and the need—both his own and that which he sees mirrored in others—left by his mother’s death and his father’s abandonment. The people with whom Ned forms relationships and who come to The Pie Hole become his proxy family, including Chuck, Olive, Emerson, Vivian, and Lily.
Chuck struggles with her estrangement from her aunts, who can’t know she’s alive again, and The Pie Hole also becomes a source of home for her, as well as a bridge between her new life and her old one. Chuck becomes an integral part of the daily life of The Pie Hole, developing her own pie recipes, helping customers, and talking Ned into adding single-serving cup pies to the menu. When she learns about her aunts’ depression and grief, she begins baking homeopathic mood enhancers into pies that Olive delivers to the aunts, an expression of care and nurturing from afar, making their lives better even when she herself cannot be a part of them. The aunts love the pies and when Olive stops delivering them, they show up at The Pie Hole, closing the gap between the two worlds of Chuck’s life with her aunts and her new, alive again life with Ned and her friends at The Pie Hole. While this blurring of the two worlds is a source of pain for Chuck—who sees her Aunt Vivian, but cannot let herself be seen by or speak to her—it is also a source of comfort and gives her a sense of agency and power in caring for her aunts. When Ned talks about closing The Pie Hole for a few hours while he and Emerson pursue a lead on a case, Chuck resists, telling him that The Pie Hole needs to be open because “people depend on it” (Season 2, Episode 1, “Circus Circus”).
In addition to Chuck’s aunts, The Pie Hole is a site of family connection and conflict for other characters as well, including Emerson’s mother (Debra Mooney), Charlotte’s alive again father (Josh Randall), Ned’s father (Jon Eric Price), and Ned’s half-brothers (Alex Miller and Graham Miller). Some of these relationships are affirming or provide positive opportunities to form unexpected connections, like Emerson’s relationship with his mother and Ned’s growing closeness with his half-brothers. However, other family encounters are sources of tension, stress, and even life-threatening danger. For example, when Chuck’s father finds himself once more alive, he has no interest in following the Piemaker’s rules for staying safe and avoiding detection, is possessively protective of Chuck, and attempts to drive a wedge between Chuck and Ned before going on the run. The characters’ biological families are complicated—and particularly for Ned, these relationships are not nurturing sources of safety or love. While The Pie Hole provides an invaluable space for characters to reconnect with and negotiate some of these complicated family relationships, it is also a space that values the boundaries they have drawn between themselves and the people who have hurt them and validates the chosen families that they have created for themselves.
The Pie Hole is incredibly important to those who work there and those they love, a place of affection, support, and safety from the dangers and uncertainties of the outside world, a home to which they know they can always return. While the mysteries at hand are ever-evolving and interpersonal complications abound, Ned, Chuck, Emerson, and Olive have a home in The Pie Hole, a place where they are loved and appreciated, where connections are formed and secrets are kept. In The Pie Hole, almost anything is possible: the expectations and limitations of the outside world take a step back as we embrace the beautiful idiosyncrasies of this world, its characters, and their journeys.
So come on in beneath the pie crust awning, step into the sweet smells and circular embrace of The Pie Hole, grab a seat, and let’s check out the Pie of the Day.
Alissa Burger is an associate professor at Culver-Stockton College in Canton, Missouri. She writes about horror, queer representation in literature and popular culture, graphic novels, and Stephen King. She loves yoga, cats, and cheese.
