I'm Only Human on the Inside
In honor of Valentine’s Day and the utter lack of things on TV because of the aftermath of the writers’ strike, go watch Cupid, one of the finest network TV series of the last ten years.
Starring Jeremy Piven (in the role of a lifetime, before he was on Entourage) and Paula Marshall (in a role that showed she doesn’t have to be a showkiller), and created by Veronica Mars showrunner Rob Thomas, Cupid was a latter-day Love Boat. In other words, an anthology show with a series of regular characters combined with a romance of the week.
But what a twist Thomas put on that hoary old TV mechanism. Piven is Trevor Hale, a guy who seemingly drops out of the blue, insisting that he’s actually the Greek god Cupid, banished from Mount Olympus and forced to rediscover his mojo by uniting 100 couples as a puny human. (Either that, or he’s completely insane. The show gives us clues both ways.) Then there’s Claire Allen, a psychologist and “relationship expert” with books and a newspaper column to her name. Amid the Moonlighting-style UST banter between Claire and Trevor, they also forcefully argue their views on love: Trevor is an unabashed supporter of passion and Claire champions detachment and logic. Except, of course, when they suddenly switch positions, which happens more than you’d think.
What a gem of a show, which lasted only 15 episodes in the 1999-2000 season. When I re-watched the pilot episode, I was grinning all the way through. It’s probably in my top 10 list of series pilots I’ve ever seen. And the show’s best episodes (along with some clunkers) were yet to come.
Want to get on the train? Go ahead. Browse the Cupid pages at Alan Sepinwall’s excellent TV blog to get recaps of the episodes, as well as remembrances from Thomas, who is actually now working on reviving the premise (sadly without Piven and Marshall) for ABC.
And let me encourage some video piracy here. Thomas himself reports that the show is out of print and unlikely to be put on DVD anytime soon. When the creator of a series orders DVD bootlegs from eBay, a certain moral weight lifts off my shoulders. So go to YouTube and search for Cupid, and you’ll find most of the episodes. Or, heck, do what I did and seek out the torrents.
What better way to celebrate Valentine’s Day, TV style, than with the god of love? Especially one who comes to you in the form of Jeremy Piven, cracking lines like “Coffee without caffeine is like sex without spanking.”
Actually, all 15 of the episodes are available on YouTube.
Here's a link to 4/5 of the pilot and all 14 of the remaining episodes and here's a link to the curiously missing first part of the pilot.
Bear in mind that the quality is YouTube-level, and the cuts between the parts is odd, to say the least.