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Well, I was thrilled when two of the better on-the-bubble shows, Dollhouse and Chuck, got 13 episode pick-ups for next season. With good news often comes bad, however, and this week, an even better show comes to a premature end, with little to no fanfare. It may not have the thematic complexity of Dollhouse, or the charming lead of Chuck, but network television loses a true masterpiece when Pushing Daisies airs its last episode this Saturday.

One of my reasons for championing the current trend of mythology programs specifically and serialized, novelistic television in general is because these shows demonstrate the potential of television as an outlet for story-telling art, and not just the proverbial time wasting, mind rotting, vast wasteland that the elite have deemed it, despite its revolutionary impact on our culture. In the past 20 years or so, in the wake of the groundbreaking Hill Street Blues and Twin Peaks, many shows have popped up, evidencing the true artistic potential of the still adolescent new medium. And, as an added bonus, many of these shows have been able to survive among the more placating visual wallpaper programming that earned television its maligned reputation in the first place. This only makes it that much more upsetting when a show of such brilliance as Pushing Daisies gets cut down before having the opportunity to show its true potential.

One of the requirements of any good show, mythology or otherwise, is a developed world in which the characters can inhabit, and I can't imagine one more fully realized than that of Bryan Fuller's Tim Burton/Dr. Seuss hybrid. Much has been made of the show's whimsy, its candy-coated fantasy, but it's not all rainbows and unicorns. A winking black comedy underlies everything. Yes, the colors are bright, and the sets elaborate, but this is a show about mortality. It's all fun and games, even though someone keeps losing an eye.

On this note, it shares a common theme with M*A*S*H, of all shows. If you don't laugh, you'll cry. Yes, it's a meticulously constructed wonderland, but a dark undercurrent, one with real consequences, cuts into the treacle. M*A*S*H does the opposite, shows the darkness, then undercuts it with humor. I think this gives M*A*S*H a gravitas which, in time (it took that show a while to become the phenomenon it was), made it palatable to mainstream audiences.

I think that's where Pushing Daisies lost its way. It's too broad, too surreal, too stagy for many people. Other fantasies, like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, for example, are set in a reality that helps to ground audiences. Daisies has no such grounding, other than Chi McBride's crotchety inspector Emerson Cod, and even he's an exaggeration of a straight man, with word spinning dialogue so clever, Buffy Summers would need a thesaurus to make heads or tails of it.

I present this as a flaw. It's not. The crafted lines and hyper-surreal visuals are superlative, yet they're beyond what television audiences have come to expect, by several light years. It's not that there's anything problematic from a creative standpoint, it's just that, as a culture, we're asked to accept a show that doesn't push the creative envelope. Instead, it makes a new one. There are steps between what we know and can accept, and Fuller's vision. Jumping over those steps is an artistic treat, but a tough pill for a culture to swallow.

You can't really blame ABC for canceling Pushing Daisies. After a solid start in the ratings, audiences started slipping and slipping. A world as deliberate as that of Daisies is expensive to maintain. While a Chuck or a Dollhouse can get by with a loyal but tiny following due to desired demographics and low costs, the cult of Daisies is just not big enough to justify the money needed to keep it alive. In time, I'm sure Pushing Daisies will have a following akin to those of Firefly or Arrested Development, a growing fan base, disgusted that this little gem died young. I'm one of them, and I hope many others join me. There's one more episode to go, then years of rewatching those 22, over and over.

And, like Arrested Development and Firefly, it won't have lived long enough to start to suck. Perhaps a small consolation, but I'm sure many X-Files fans wish that it had ended before John Doggett came along. Pushing Daisies will never have a John Doggett era to taint its legacy. It will just have a perfect, if tiny, run. And one day, it'll be inconceivable that it lasted as short a time as it did. In the mean time, tune in Saturday. And buy the DVD. Maybe we'll get a movie.