Cupid! and other musings

It’s weird that so many tv shows are getting the greenlight to come back from the dead lately (i.e. Futurama, Jericho, Family Guy), but this has to be the first time that a network is going to resurrect a show from a decade ago. But that’s what ABC’s doing for Rob Thomas’ (Veronica Mars, and the now cancelled Big Shots) old cult hit, Cupid. If you don’t remember, Cupid starred Jermey Piven as the god of love, Eros, sent to Earth without his bow and arrow as punishment by Zeus for letting love decay to the state it had become back in the late 90’s. He was released from the looney bin under the supervision of relationship psychologist Claire Allen (Paula Marshall, known mostly for being the “porn star” from Sports Night), a 25 year old hot doctor who took a cold and calculating approach to love. His job was to set up 100 couples before he could come back to Mt. Olympus, and it was pretty apparent that Claire was inevitably going to end up as Psyche, the mortal wife of Cupid in mythology, which would obviously have led to Cupid having to make the decision whether to go back to immortality and an eternity of hedonism, or true love as a mortal on Earth. It was voted as the #4 of the Top Ten Shows Cancelled Before Their Time by E!Online, and was supposed to launch Piven into the stratosphere the way that Entourage inevitably did years later (Piven’s actually not going to be in the remake, which is going to be interesting to say the least).

If you actually go back and watch Cupid (as I’ve been doing lately in honor of this tremendous news), it’s pretty hilarious to see the views people had on love, even cliched TV love back then. The stereotypes of 30-something singles’ views on the opposite sex were reduced to a kind of simplistic, “why can’t s/he understand why I am not rugged/can’t dance/am shy/don’t want to get hurt” kind of cycle that in the end, makes me truly wonder how this revamped version will take on the current state of love today (as if it’s any better than it was back in 1998). This is capped off with my recent addiction to watching the 1990 tv show Northern Exposure, in which the second season premiere largely revolves around Joel, the main character, having a nervous breakdown because his fiancee broke up with him as he’s rapidly approaching 30 and still completely unattached. The show treats this revelation like it’s the end of the world. As if that’s such a strange thing today.

I say this, being close to 30 (I turn 28 this year) and completely unattached (as are I believe, two other members of this blog? Correct me if I’m wrong here fellas), it’s weird to watch these shows hammer home the implicit “your life is over!!!!!” message that seems to run through the various plotlines these characters get into. Meanwhile, I recently caught up with a large number of people from my high school and hear the scuttlebutt on who’s married, who has kids, et cetera. I’m not freaking out, more so, I find myself moving in the other direction. I’m kind of repulsed by the idea of settling down anytime soon. I wonder how that factors into how Cupid’s going to fare, most people aren’t as ready to buy into that kind of message these days, at least in the groups of friends I hang out with. Maybe all the girls I’m around are secretly freaking out with those ticking biological timebombs inside them, or the guys I know are just the proverbial sad clowns, going through the motions at the bars and clubs and having the sex while feeling completely unsatisfied. But I doubt it. More than that, I just feel like everyone is perfectly happy to wait for the right thing to come along, and are pretty comfortable with having fun in the meantime. Sure the divorce rate is rising, but maybe it’s because simply put, less young people are getting married so fast (and all the marriages from the previous generation are falling apart from diving into that domesticated life too quickly). And that makes me wonder if the state of love is really as bad as we all make it out to be. It really is all how you look at it.

I could of course be totally wrong (I mean, talk to me in five years if I’m still single, see how I feel about all this). But I’m interested to see if Cupid can deliver on that awesome premise and make it relevant to today’s times, or if it’ll flop and be just completely culturally irrevelant. At the very least, I’ll be watching, and I guess that’s all that matters to ABC. And who knows if I’ll be filling out a Nielsen journal for one viewer or two.