Our thanks to Blast Magazine for this recent interview of Pushing Daisies creator Bryan Fuller.

Let's highlight a few things he had to say about season two of our favorite show...

You guys got cut really short last year. How did that change the story progression?
You know, there’s a lot of stuff that we’re doing this year that we were going to do in the first season, but I think what really helped us is the fact that this is the second season and there were some stories the network was really nervous about like “I don’t know if that’s a first season story or if you should save that for second season.”

It really actually helped us to come back with the second season so we could do some of the stories they were nervous about letting us do in the first season, since we had such a short first season, we got to do right away in the second season. It also really helped us kind of get perspective on the show.

When the shut down happened, when it was like “Pencils down” from the Writer’s Guild, we were almost at the end of our scripts anyways, so we were scrambling to get another script ready, and then the shut down happened, so we didn’t have to worry about that. So a lot of those ideas we kind of got back-burnered but the specific episodes; we redid like one or two of them and there are still quite a few that we want to do from last year that were going to be part of the first season.

The good thing is that we were just able to get perspective. So we took a step back from the show and being on break and working the terrors of production gave us a chance to just stop and say “Okay, what’s the story that we want to tell?”, “Where are these characters going?” It just gave us the necessary breathing room to chart out a second season which I am really proud of and very excited by.

I think the writer’s strike allowed us to not get trapped in the sophomore slump of shows and you feel kind of a lag in the creativity because you see it literally go right from one to the other, and in this case it really allowed us to recharge our batteries, consider what was working on the show and maybe what was not working as well and just have a much more invigorated approach to the second season.

Can you give us a preview of what we might be seeing in the second season?
All the cliff-hangers that we had; we had the cliff-hanger with Swoosie Kurtz’s character Lily, that plays a big factor in the first three episodes. Really, beyond that, it really is just a big game changer that affects all of the characters; we understand why that secret was kept and why Lily made the choices that she did to not be honest with Chuck about their relationship and we see what happens when Olive, who has been keeping all these secrets from everybody, how her breakdown sends her off to a nunnery to keep those secrets and what happens when she comes back and lets Chuck know and where does that take Chuck, what’s Chuck’s reaction.

She’s in a difficult situation because she can’t just go to Lily. Here are these two people like mother and daughter who both think the other one is dead, and it puts them in a really odd situation that we’re going to have a lot of fun with that drama of that particular situation.

We also are introducing a character in episode five named Dwight Dixon played by Stephen Root, and he will have a shared history with Chuck’s father and Ned’s father and will stir up a lot of hullaballoo for Ned and he becomes a catalyst to really bring the aunts into the story of the Pie Hole in a way that we really hadn’t seen last year because it was one of those things we were forced to do because of Chuck’s situation and people not knowing she was alive again was to keep the aunts separate.

In our first episode, we have the aunts marching through the front door of the Pie Hole and what happens to our characters when that world starts to encroach on theirs and how do they react. It really is about trying to put the characters in really fun situations where they’re forced to keep the secrets that they’ve been trying to keep keeping but may not be able to for long because the walls between worlds are crumbling down.

Matt Richenthal is the Editor in Chief of TV Fanatic. Follow him on Twitter and on Google+.