Cupid Is Surprisingly Not Stupid

Cupid is the story of, well, Cupid. He’s been kicked out of Mount Olympus and before he’s allowed back in he needs to bring 100 couples together. Unfortunately with Cupid getting an early cancelation it would appear that 93 couples are going to remain apart and alone... forever.

Whilst trying to hook up the first of these 100 couples Cupid is arrested and meets a shrink played by Sarah Paulson who as you may or may not remember was really freaking irritating in Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip. The shrink believes that he’s not really Cupid and that he’s just delusional.

But lo and behold Cupid goes about his business of hooking people up much to Sarah Paulson’s confusion/amusement/falling-in-love-with-him-ness. The first episode deals with the main guy from Meet The Spartans searching for a girl he met one time in Ireland, but instead he falls for a reporter played by Connie from The Mighty Ducks.

And this is where we run into the first problem with the pilot: I really liked the couple. I really liked Meet The Spartans guy, I really like Connie from The Mighty Ducks and I really liked their 40 minute little romantic comedy... but that was this week’s couple, next week I assume there’ll be a new couple for us to fawn over.

So when my favourite characters in the show are the two that won’t be back next week you might call that an ‘issue’. That’s like if on the first episode of CSI my favourite characters where the victim’s distressed wife, and his best friend who surprise surprise turned out to be the killer.

On the flipside the show scores points for being actually romantic and not completely hokey like the misfires Valentine or The Ex List from earlier in the season; both of which were god awful pieces of trash. And by straddling the line between ‘is he cupid or is he delusional’ the creators can keep things in the “real world” and not delve into the mythology and supernatural like Valentine did with dodgy special effects and tiresome exposition.

I can’t tell you whether the 1998 version is any better or any different as I haven’t seen the original Cupid. But I bet Jeremy Piven was a better Cupid than Bobby Cannavale and only because he is Jeremy Piven and Jeremy Piven is awesome.

The most surprising thing about Cupid isn’t the fact that the “mini romantic comedy” each week thing sort of actually works, the most surprising thing is that I didn’t want to shoot Sarah Paulson between the eyes. NOW that’s an achievement.

In the end Cupid turned out to be a lot better than I thought it was going to be, which of course isn’t a stretch as I thought it was going to be god awful. So for now we’re going to keep watching it – I’ll keep you posted as to whether this ‘good’ gets downgraded over the course of it’s very short season, but until I may (and wait for this really bad pun) be falling in love with Cupid...

Good, Average, Bad or Ugly?

Good.