Ready for another screed about how a television show has failed to satisfy me? You are? You are ready for some unexpected things!
I wanted to like Cupid ’09! I did. I loved Cupid ’98 and I loved Veronica Mars, so Rob Thomas + more exposure + more money had to add up to something good, right? No! Cupid ’09 is a stupid television show that is bad. Tonight I had to turn it off halfway through. I have identified three reasons for this, listed in order of increasing subtlety.
First, the writing is bad. Advertising bad. Not freecreditreport.com commercial bad, but easily eHarmony bad. I have no way of accounting for this. Rob Thomas has demonstrated repeatedly that he can write, and indeed manage a writing team well; has he concentrated so hard on that that he has forgotten how to read?
Second, the shooting style is weird and elliptic. They seem to have fewer ad breaks than a typical show, but they try to deal with that by throwing in B-roll with lots of lens flare. It ends up looking like a documentary with pretensions instead of a comic drama. (Speaking of which, it also seems to have no dramatic or comedic elements, but that goes back to #1.)
Third–and honestly, this is the killer–Bobby Cannavale isn’t Jeremy Piven. He’s a good actor, and Jeremy Piven isn’t the only guy who would be capable of taking on the role, but to make Cupid work, Trevor has to be kind of a jackass. Cannavale’s Trevor is ripped, deep-voiced, gentle, well-dressed, polite and full of faith in human nature. Piven’s was horny, cynical, scruffy and smirking. Piven was playing Han Solo, writ short; Cannavale seems to think he’s in Touched by an Angel.
Fourth, it is impossible to stop hating Cannavale’s fauxhawk, which appears in 80% of the shots. He had a fauxhawk while in the mental hospital. No. No.
Point three there is indicative of a larger issue, which is that the cast has no chemistry. They’re all about as lively as shellshocked deer. Sarah Paulsen’s lone facial expression already helped sink Studio 60, of course, but Jeffrey D. Sams’s seething bouncer roommate created just as many sparks as Paula Marshall’s Claire; Rick Gomez’s stand-in seems to deal with Trevor by simply turning to Valium.
Absent any conflict among the regulars, the show has to lean on its match-of-the-week for interest, and nobody cares about them. Nobody did before, either. We just liked seeing how they illuminated the tension between Claire and Trevor, but this time, there’s nothing there to see.