Cupid

You know, when I saw the trailer for the Rob Thomas/Diane Ruggiero remake of Cupid — now scheduled for the none-too-promising time slot of Tuesday at 10 p.m. — the thing it most reminded me of was that South Park episode that parodied the trailers for Rob Schneider movies. Specifically, the fact that “comedy” trailers always have the same rhythm, so that you could replace the narration with nonsense words and it would still have the exact same inflections. “Comes the story of one man… who will do whatever it takes… to make looove happen!” From the creators of Der and Tum Ta Titilly Tum Ta Too.

Serialized shows are being phased out in favour of old-fashioned stand-alone episodes

With the remake going into production, let’s re-familiarize ourselves with one of the great cult flops of the ’90s, Rob Thomas’s Cupid with Jeremy Piven. It’s still Piven’s best role, Ari Gold or no Ari Gold, and as I said, the guy he reminds me of most is Bruce Willis — the youngish Bruce Willis of Moonlighting. That character was conceived as an alternative to all the Sensitive Guys on TV in the ’80s, someone who was kind of crude and obnoxious, but was nevertheless likable because there was something sweet about him. Like Willis’s David Addison, Piven’s Cupid is annoying, but in a childish kind of way; he’s really a child in a man’s body. Besides, we need more TV heroes who don’t have an excessive amount of hair. Here’s the pilot.

I have a theory that you can tell how important a show is to a big-name TV writer/producer by how many of his Trusted Lieutenants(tm) he hires to work on the show. By that standard, the remake of Cupid, now going into production as a series, must be really important to Rob Thomas: the show has at least three other producers from Veronica Mars, including his second-in-command in the writing of Mars, Diane Ruggiero. (Ruggiero also fits into the category of showrunners working on other people’s shows while between projects; she was recently booted from her job as showrunner of The Ex List.)