Tune In, Turn On

Krause plays Nick George, a do-gooder lawyer who is pulled into the seedy inner world of the Darling family, New York's richest, most powerful clan, whom Nick's father represented before his suspicious death. The elder George wasn't there for Nick because he had to be there for the Darlings, whose antics make legal expertise a frequent necessity. So when paterfamilias Tripp Darling (Sutherland) invites him to take over his father's work, he's understandably hesitant. He doesn't want to be the ghost of a family man his father was, but when Tripp sweetens the pot by offering a $10 million bonus to be used at Nick's altruistic whim, he can't resist. By the end of the pilot, the Darlings have already gotten their money's worth.

What works so well about "Money" is its nod-and-wink tone. It knows it's an "Us Weekly" soap and prefers to camp it up rather than take itself more seriously than the audience possibly could. The self-aware humor starts with the casting—how brilliant was it to cast Sutherland and Baldwin, two members of dynastic families, to play members of a dynastic family? Krause is terrific as Nick, the idealistic lawyer who's trying to walk through a cow pasture without getting his feet dirty. He'll fail, of course, but it'll be a hoot to watch.

Pushing Daisies
ABC, 8:00 ET, premieres Oct. 3
Writing a review of "Pushing Daisies" is almost a futile exercise. Any attempt to describe the show makes it sound precious and pretentious. It's extremely stylized, and the pilot was directed by Barry Sonnenfeld, whose passion for gaudy set pieces and quirky, fussy details has sunken a few summer blockbusters. It also seems childish on the surface, which is not entirely untrue, and it features that narrator whose voice is so pregnant with glee that he sounds in danger of cracking up at any moment.

Give it the benefit of the doubt, and discover an ultrabright fantasy charmer crossed with a dark murder mystery and a genuinely touching love story. It does all three to perfection, and is just frankly a joy to watch.

Lee Pace plays Ned, who discovers as a boy that he has a strange gift, the ability to touch things and bring them back to life. Of course, the gift is also the curse. It comes with some pretty inconvenient caveats. Once Ned revives someone, he or she can stay alive for only one minute—any longer and someone else in the immediate vicinity dies. The real downer: once he's brought someone back to life, no matter the length of time, he can never touch them again or they go back to being dead forever. This fanciful conceit is bound to scare away concrete thinkers who will immediately go into "But why?" mode. Be clear: the "but why" is never addressed, and according the narrator may never be. But the adventure Ned gets into after reviving his estranged childhood crush, Chuck (Anna Friel), is such a blast to watch, once it's gotten its steam up, the particulars of Ned's power become totally inconsequential. This one will take a bit of patience at first, especially from people who aren't usually into fantasy-based shows, but it's well worth the effort. "Pushing Daisies" reveals itself to be a charming, subversive, nasty little fairy tale that suggests where Dr. Seuss might have gone if he'd started penning adult mysteries under a pseudonym.

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