Sigh.
No, that wasn’t a happy sigh. It wasn’t a sigh of contentment. It was disappointment and disillusionment and disgust. It was lamentation of the fact that Rob Thomas has trodden on his own creation with the same ham-handed, tin-eared lack of grace George Lucas demonstrated with Phantom Menace. It was just a sigh.
Cupid, for the many who don’t remember it, was a short-lived ABC romcom from the ’98-’99 season. It starred Jeremy Piven as the titular god of love (maybe) and Paula Marshall as the cynical, down to Earth psychiatrist assigned to cure his insanity (or was it?) It ran for only 15 episodes with a few mediocre, a few pretty bad, and one or two absolute gems. I challenge anyone to watch the episode “Heart of the Matter” and not find the room getting dusty.
So a couple of years back, Rob Thomas was talking with ABC trying to come up with a new show that incorporated some of the same themes and motifs and eventually both sides decided he should just redo Cupid. After all, this isn’t the ABC of the late ’90s; today’s ABC could easily find a place to slot in a romcom. So remake and redo they did.
