Watching Studio60

Tonight at 8 p.m. marks the debut of Pushing Daisies, a show that sounds really quite a bit too quirky for its own good. But it’s also a show with a Studio 60 connection in the person of Kristin Chenowith, the sometime Sorkin sweetie who was allegedly the model for Harriet Hayes.

Chenowith — who also appeared on The West Wing, though after Sorkin’s tenure, as PR maven Annabeth Schott — stars as pie-shop waitress Olive Snook in the fantasy/detective series, in which a young man has the power to bring people back from the dead just by touching them, but if he touches them again they go back to being dead.

That’s convenient when he’s helping a PI solve murder cases by asking the briefly re-animated corpse whodunnit, but not so convenient when he brings the love of his life back around and can’t touch her again lest he kill her for good.

I don’t know. I’m usually up for a good offbeat piece of business. But this one sounds like it’s being offbeat just for the sake of being offbeat, and that rarely comes to good. I may give it a chance due to Chenowith’s involvement, but it better deliver something worthwhile, quick.

I notice that ABC’s Pushing Daisies site has a feature called “Plant-a-Daisy” in which you can enter the name of someone who has died and write one question you’d ask. Maybe we should all write in Studio 60 and say that we’d ask for one more darn season. Just how good is this guy at bringing stuff back to life, anyway?

_{Photo: ABC.com}

Studio 60, NBC, Pushing Daisies, ABC, Kristin Chenowith