Oct 07 2008
Chi McBride Knows Knitting
Our friends’ over at BuzzSugar got to spend some time on the set of PUSHING DAISIES during the summer press tour. While there they got to chat it up with the cast. They just posted their interview with Emerson Cod himself, Chi McBride.
Here’s a bit of that interview for your reading pleasure.
BuzzSugar: Does Emerson’s function on the show shift at all this year?
Chi: He’s on a mission to find his daughter, but he’s going to go about it in a very unconventional way. He’s also a huge fan of pop-up books, and he wants to create a pop-up book that will lead a little girl who reads it to find her father. He feels sure that some little girl is out there wondering, “Where’s my daddy?” And so he writes this book to try to see if he can get her to find him since he can’t find her, so that’s his mission this year. And in the meantime, if he happens to make a couple bucks, well, good! It’s not just about getting stacks and stacks of money. I think that him being a provider, or not being able to be one, probably has a lot to do with why he’s so obsessed with money. He just takes on a completely different tone once you start peeling those layers and finding out what he’s really after.
Do you feel like it’s a problem to have been off the air for so long?
Chi: I hope not, I really do. That’s one thing I really wish people would wake up and understand, is that . . . audiences do not like to be played with. Sometimes I think we’re in this business and we take it for granted —”Aw, everybody wants to go to the movies! What are you worried about?” Look, the audience does not like to be fooled around with! When baseball went on strike, it took years and a juiced ball and steroids to get everybody back. . . . Television’s the same way. People take this stuff really seriously. They want to get home, they want to kick their shoes off, they want to watch their television shows. You start messing around with that, especially when you can make reality shows for nothing and get any schmo off the street to open his train wreck of a life, and people are saying “Hey, what’s that?”
Oh wow, I had no idea that Chi was the one who came up with Emerson’s backstory. Awesome
Ditto to Brooke. How come that never came up during the first season? Hmm. Chi has really been overlooked. Awesome idea for the Emerson character, and what else don’t we know about this show?
Thanks to Chi for understanding our frustration as an audience during the strike. My one and only show was taken away — I watched a LOT of movies last spring.
And it will be taken away again. After the abysmal ratings for the premiere, I don’t see any possible way for cancellation to be avoided. And it’s an extremely sad thing.
Gee, ABC, maybe producing no new episodes after the strike ended (even two or three) wasn’t such a hot idea after all. So Chi is going to relive “The Nine” all over again…
Don’t give up on it yet KellyH, after all, it was only one episode in so far. Hopefully the ratings will be higher this week, since there is a lot of dissatisfaction with the Knight Rider remake
Ugh, I can’t believe PD is losing to Knight Rider. I’m old enough to remember the first version of Knight Rider… Not sure why anyone wanted to bring that show back, but I think I’d rather be forced to watch a few consecutive episodes of The OC. I may have just thrown up in my mouth a little.
I’m sure PD will bounce back, like Chuck’s second life chance.