The new issue of TV Guide (the Fall Preview edition) features a set visit to Pushing Daisies as part of the cover story. We’ll get scans up shortly, but until then, here’s the article (warning: minor spoilers under the cut):

TV Guide Visits the Set of Pushing Daisies

We set our calendars by it, and here it comes again: a new TV season, and with it, TV Guide’s annual Fall Preview issue. This year, there’s something for everybody in the 28 new network series, from new reality shows to the charming surreality of ABC’s much-touted Pushing Daisies. Here’s a taste:

PUSHING DAISIES

Starring Swoosie Kurtz, Anna Friel, Ellen Greene, Lee Pace, Chi McBride, Kristin Chenoweth

Premieres Wednesday, 10 pm/ET, ABC

Wander onto Stage 18 of the Warner Bros. lot and you’re likely to find a few things you don’t see every day, not even on a Hollywood set. Like a roof resembling a pastry crust and dangling-cherry light fixtures; two ominous white coffins stacked precariously on top of each other; and a lime-green car called the Dandy Lion that runs on, yes, dandelion fumes. Its current driver and two passengers are partially zipped into clear plastic body bags, their wrists restrained by ropes. And two of them are particularly preoccupied with not touching each other.

You couldn’t make this stuff up. And yet former Heroes coexec producer Bryan Fuller has, as part of his whimsical new ABC series Pushing Daisies. In a prime-time landscape cluttered with cop, lawyer and doctor dramas, Daisies‘ premise is refreshingly original: Intimacy-challenged pie baker Ned (Lee Pace) can bring the dead back to life with a single touch. But touch them again and they’re dead once more — this time for good. He puts his cursed gift to use in a side gig, helping private eye Emerson (Chi McBride) solve murder cases by resuscitating victims just long enough to learn the culprit’s identity and collect a tidy reward. But when Ned discovers that his plucky childhood crush, Chuck (Anna Friel), is one of the victims, he can’t bear to lose her again. “They’ve found their soul mates, but they can never touch or she’s dead,” Pace says. (Hence the panicked frenzy to avoid any flesh-on-flesh contact in the Dandy Lion.)

Thanks in part to the deft direction of Barry Sonnenfeld (Men in Black), who’s also one of the show’s executive producers, Daisies shifts from lush fairy-tale romance to comedy to fantastical murder mystery as effortlessly as Ned restores life. And for a show preoccupied with death, it’s surprisingly uplifting, right down to the candy-colored palette that recalls a children’s storybook. Little wonder, then, that Daisies has already bloomed into a critics’ darling.

Pace’s chemistry with British-born Friel was palpable from the start — which is a good thing, since Ned and Chuck’s star-crossed relationship is the soul of the series. “Our jobs are to make the audience want them together and feel their frustration that they can’t be,” Friel says. Fuller is already devising clever ways for the couple to get around the no-touch impediment, including kissing through Saran Wrap and dancing in beekeeper suits. But possible death isn’t their only complication: Olive, the pie-shop waitress played by Kristin Chenoweth, harbors a consuming crush on Ned — and she’s willing and able to have full-on physical contact.

Despite being at the helm of one of fall’s most anticipated new shows, Fuller insists he isn’t feeling pressure to succeed. “First and foremost, the audience is me,” he says. “I know that sounds selfish, but the show came out of wanting to see something I wanted to watch.” Let’s hope a few more viewers agree. —Shawna Malcom