I was as much in thrall to NBC’s “Must-See TV” blocks in the mid-’90s as anyone else, but by the end of the decade, my wife and I were watching ABC about as much as we were watching any other network. For a time there, ABC was taking real chances with their hourlong dramas, giving a shot—if only a brief one— to unusual shows like Murder One, Relativity and Nothing Sacred. One of the best of those here-and-gone efforts was Cupid, a whimsical, smart take on modern love starring Paula Marshall as a prim pop-psychologist who didn’t believe in romance, and Jeremy Piven as one of her patients: a man who claimed to be the mythological Eros, sent here to Earth to match 100 couples in order to earn re-entry to Olympus. Each of the show’s 14 aired episodes were about Piven trying to bring people together while Marshall argued that his stunts and theatrics were actually proving detrimental to the cause of true love. Meanwhile, Cupid kept fighting his attraction to his doctor, certain that coupling with a mortal would end his shot at Olympus; and the doctor kept digging into her patient’s past, plumbing the depth of his presumed psychosis. Cupid was like Miracle On 34th Street with a healthy dose of cynicism balancing out the fantasy.
After creating Cupid, writer-producer Rob Thomas kicked around the TV industry for a few years and then had some success with his second major series, the intricate high school detective show Veronica Mars (which probably didn’t have any more regular viewers than Cupid, but aired on a smaller network and thus ran for three full, mostly awesome seasons). Once VM ended, Thomas migrated back to ABC, where he’s been serving as a kind of utility player while developing new series. As a reward for being a good soldier, Thomas has been given the chance to re-start Cupid from the beginning, with a whole new cast—operating under the assumption that perhaps the show was ahead of its time.
The new Cupid’s pilot episode sets the premise up kind of perfunctorily. Eros (now played by Bobby Cannavale) is in the midst of helping an Irish street musician named Dave (played by Sean Maguire) reconnect with a New Yorker he met back home, by changing NYC’s “Happy New Year” lights display to “Holly I’m Here.” Watching the stunt from her couch, the pop-psychologist, Claire (now played by Sarah Paulson) shakes her head at the near-psychotic show of romantic desperation. But after Cupid gets arrested—taking the fall for Dave so that he can save him from deportation—Claire is called in to an asylum to evaluate the god's mental state, and immediately becomes captivated by Cupid’s confidence, and his fervent belief in love stories that please the immortals. She’s also half-convinced by his encyclopedic knowledge of Greek myth—except that he doesn’t remember that the real Cupid was married, to a mortal named Psyche. If this modern-day Cupid is the same as the Cupid of old, could Claire be his Psyche?