Cupid (1998 TV series)
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Cupid was a romantic Dramedy series that aired for one season in 1998 on ABC, by Rob Thomas, who also worked on Dawson's Creek and Veronica Mars.
It starred Jeremy Piven as Trevor Hale and Paula Marshall as Dr. Claire Allen.
The show's premise was simple. Trevor was an outpatient who had to keep seeing his psychiatrist, Dr. Allen, for treatment of his delusion: that he believes himself to be the Cupid, Roman god of love, kicked off Olympus and stripped of his godly powers by Zeus for slacking off on his duties (which is why mortals have such a high divorce rate). Trevor cannot return home to Olympus until he has made one hundred lasting romantic pairings. Claire works with him on recovering from this delusion -- only the show never makes it clear: is Trevor just a deluded romantic, or is he really who he says he is? We don't know; but one thing is certain: Trevor is a really gifted matchmaker and an incurable romantic.
Trevor works as a bartender, along with his friend Champ, the better to be in position to find lonely singles and make those matches.
After it screwed him the first time, ABC agreed, an incredible decade after the demise of the original show, to revisit the idea and give the show another season with a brand new cast.
- Belligerent Sexual Tension - And how.
- California Doubling - Averted; the shows are set and filmed in their respective cities (Chicago, 1998; New York, 2009).
- Fan Girl - Claire's love for Sunset And Vaughn is strong enough that she's unsettled when her inner fangirl shows up as she's acting as a professional.
- Friday Night Death Slot
- Line-of-Sight Name:
- Trevor's name comes from the fresco behind the judges in the hearing panel. See the different versions for the original lines.
- "And love shall make the Earth tremor / as it's reborn in a storm of fire and hail"
- Literary Agent Hypothesis - Trevor treats the book of mythology as if some writer got most of the details right. He claims Cupid has no mortal wife called Psyche. Presumably because if Trevor is Cupid, he just hasn't found her yet.
- Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane - We don't know if Trevor Hale is delusional or exactly who he says he is.
- Meaningful Name - Trevor Hale anagrams out to Heart Lover.
- Mythology Gag - using actual mythology.
- Setting Update - The Cupid/Psyche myth in CONTEMPORARY TIMES.
- Plucky Office Girl - Kristy, one of the beneficiaries of Trevor's attention, in the episode Botched Makeover.
- Real Song Theme Tune - "Human" by The Pretenders, a remake of "Human on the Inside" by the Divinyls
- Screwed by the Network - bounced around from the Friday Night Death Slot to Saturday to Thursday to cancelled.
- She's Got Legs - One of the things Trevor notices during the initial interviews with Claire. As soon as she realizes he's leering, she subtly swings her chair to hide them behind her desk.
- Show Within a Show - "Sunset and Vaughn," a fictional Buddy Cop Show that also happens to take place in Chicago. Champ manages a minor, recurring role at one point.
- Smart People Know Latin: Trevor and a love-lorn professor are discussing picking up women in a bar.
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- They Fight Crime - briefly alluded to by Champ when Trevor is asked to work with a man believing himself to be Don Quixote.
- UST - Trevor and Claire
- Will They or Won't They? - Trevor eggs Claire on regarding how much time she seems to want to spend around him outside of his therapy sessions.
- Word of God - (Big Spoiler) In an interview Thomas said that the series would have ended with Cupid's nature left ambiguous; he'd have "given up" his divine nature to stay with Claire, but we'd never know for sure. See Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane.