Strike Survival TV Club: Cupid, "Botched Makeover"

And so we come to the end. Spoilers for "Botched Makeover," the final episode of "Cupid," coming up just as soon as I beat up some skel...

"Botched Makeover" was the final episode of "Cupid" to be produced, and as Rob Thomas mentions below, the cast and crew actually found out they'd been canceled while they were still working on it. It never aired on ABC, though it popped up in several foreign markets, which explains its YouTube-ability. (I've also seen a bootleg version of an Israeli telecast, complete with Hebrew subtitles.)

Like I was saying in the review for "The Children's Hour," this clearly wasn't intended as a series finale -- Trevor doesn't even make a match in this one -- but there are certain elements that make it a less-than-painful closing note. Specifically, I like that the final episode climaxes with Trevor and Claire swing-dancing. If, as Claire said many episodes before, she knows Trevor has a libido because she's seen him dance, then this is the closest they would ever come to sex, given the professional (doctors don't date patients) and mythological (sex with a mortal = no more immortality) barriers.

Claire spends a lot of time in this episode talking about the culture reverting to classic romantic standards -- "Dancing cheek to cheek, dressing up," etc. -- and the main plot of the hour is in itself a throwback. It's the famous, "Why, without your glasses, you're beautiful!!!!" story that you'd often see in films from the '30s through the early '60s.

Our not-so-plain Jane is Kristy Holbrook, a mousy writer's assistant on the ever-popular show-within-the-show "Sunset and Vaughn." Kristy's played by Laura Leighton, who was just coming off her stint as slutty Sydney on "Melrose Place." The wardrobe and makeup people did what they could to create Kristy's bag lady look, but it was about as convincing as that episode of "Gilligan's Island" where a homely woman stopped by the island and got a makeover that turned her into the spitting image of Ginger, you know?

That said, there are some interesting things going on in her story. Usually, the show would establish one guy and one girl and create an obstacle that Trevor would have to overcome to get them together. Here, Kristy has a couple of potential suitors: Josh, a junior writer on "Sunset and Vaughn" who encourages Kristy to move up the ladder to actually write for the show, and Tom, a handsome cad whom Claire throws out of the singles group after realizing he's just using it to find desperate women who will sleep with him. (Also, unbeknownst to her, he has a bet with a friend about scoring three girls in three weeks, which feels almost quaint a decade later. I imagine the same script today would have Tom trying to score three in three nights or something.)

So Tom is set up as the bastard that Trevor needs to save Kristy from, and Josh seems like the sweet guy she'll cease to notice once she's made over to resemble Laura Leighton, but this being "Cupid," things are more complicated than that. Tom begins to genuinely like Kristy, and not just because of how she looks (it's the "She's All That" plot, for you young'uns), while Josh tries to take credit for Kristy's script idea as his own. In the end, Kristy rightly kicks both guys to the curb, and even tones down the more boob-tastic aspects of her makeover while finding newfound confidence in both her appearance and ability to write. Trevor doesn't get his match, but he does help her.

While all of that is going on in the anthological half of the episode, Claire and Champ team up to try to take Trevor down a peg in a swing dance competition (yes, I know "Swingers" was two years earlier, but sometimes it takes TV a while to catch up to trends), and Trevor hustles his way into a guest-starring role on the increasingly "NYPD Blue"-esque "Sunset and Vaughn."

I've talked in the past about how Champ was a character the show rarely knew what to do with (he's the first thing I'd want to "improve" with the remake), but he and Claire make a nice combination in their rare bursts of shared screen time. As the two non-insane/godly members of the cast, they both have to suffer the walking disruption that is Trevor, and it's nice to see them bond over it in the end, even though Champ winds up bailing on the contest so the writers can put Piven and Marshall on the dance floor together.

And now it's time for the final installment of Rob Remembers, where "Cupid" creator Rob Thomas takes a break from rewriting the pilot script for the "Cupid" remake to offer a look behind the scenes at "Botched Makeover":

The Cupid cast learned that we'd been cancelled as they were shooting the big dance scene during "Botched Makeover." We also learned at the time that the episode we were shooting would never be released. To their credit, everyone sucked it up and did quality work, though the set was a pretty miserable place to be in the aftermath.

(The episode did end up airing in several foreign markets, however.)

Perhaps the most common way of becoming a television writer is to first get hired as an assistant on a television show. It's a prime stepping stone. Assistants talk to the agents assistants who will become agents some day. They learn the process from the inside. They can usually convince producers on the show to read their spec scripts. A couple days after ABC announced the Cupid pilot had been ordered, I received a letter through my old Texas address from a woman named Vanessa Taylor who wanted to be my assistant. I'd never had an assistant, and, frankly, didn't even realize I would be afforded one. Nevertheless, I admired the tenacity, and I hired her.

Vanessa co-wrote "Botched Make-over" with me, and she did a fantastic job. So fantastic, that I then hired her on my next project, SNOOPS -- which, perhaps, turned out to be a very mixed blessing. She very quickly climbed the ranks, and eventually co-created the very well-received WB show JACK AND BOBBY.

A sidenote -- the fictional cop show within the show, SUNSET AND VAUGHN, is a show title that I've always been fond of in a "can we think of a campy title to a fictional cop show." It reappeared in an episode of VERONICA MARS when we had a close-up of a Tivo recorded programs screen. Also, in a nod to the original notion that Champ wouldn't accept any roles expressly written for Black actors, his character has the surname "Cohen." That's the very inside joke that I am, perhaps, the only person who finds amusing.

A few other thoughts on "Botched Makeover":

-As the Internet's leading "NYPD Blue" junkie, I was particularly amused to see all the "Blue" touches in "Sunset and Vaughn," whether it was Claire's love of seeing Sunset's naked butt every week or the jittery, hard-boiled interrogation scenes with junkies.

-Love the entire sequence where the post-makeover Kristy enters the singles group, from Claire forcibly hurling Trevor into the next room to Trevor responding to her accusation that he did everything she warned him not to with "Not true. I did not open that Tabasco lubricant."

-One specific change in the remake is that it'll be set in Los Angeles instead of Chicago. While it's a shame to lose the unique architecture and character of the windy city, if there's a Champ character in the new show and he's still an actor, at least we won't have to deal with the contrivance of an LA-set cop show being written and produced out of a Chicago studio.

Up next: b'dee, b'dee, that's all, folks! Back when I started this idea, the plan was to add a second show at some point, most likely "Sports Night," but I wound up having so many other things on my plate even during the strike that there wasn't time for it. Now that the strike's over and primetime TV is only a few weeks away from a return, there's no point in starting up again, so we'll revisit the TV Club idea in the summer. (If you want to see the reviews I did last summer of "Freaks and Geeks," click here.)

What did everybody else think? And, after going through all these episodes with me, do you think the world is ready for a "Cupid" remake? Casting will obviously be crucial (it's hard to think of a better Trevor than Jeremy Piven, or better chemistry than Piven and Paula Marshall had), but what tweaks, if any, would you make to the formula the second time around? Click here to read the full post

Strike Survival TV Club: Cupid, "The Children's Hour"

One week (and several hours) later than normal, it's time to head into the homestretch of our "Cupid" club, with spoilers for the penultimate episode, "The Children's Hour," coming up just as soon as I put some batteries down my pants...

"The Children's Hour" was the final episode of "Cupid" to air before then-ABC chiefs Jamie Tarses (the inspiration for the Amanda Peet character on "Studio 60") and Stu Bloomberg (the man with the greatest soul patch to ever occupy a network executive suite) pulled the plug. While neither this episode nor the unaired "Botched Makeover" were written as a series finale, there are parts of each that unintentionally work as final notes. No, Trevor never comes close to the 100 couple barrier, nor do we find out whether he's man or god, nor does the show ever get the chance to have Trevor and Claire confront their attraction directly, but in the lemonade from lemons category, "Children's Hour" offers us Trevor's final match and Claire celebrating Cupid's Day, while "Botched Makeover" has... well, why don't we wait until Friday, or else we won't have much to talk about with the final episode.

Just as Halloween is a money in the bank holiday for shows with supernatural or horror themes, Valentine's Day could have been the gift that kept on giving for a hypothetical world where "Cupid" ran for 7 or 8 seasons. We've already seen in previous episodes (notably "Meat Market") that Trevor hates the popular conception of Cupid as the cherubic baby with the bow and arrow, and this episode gives him an opportunity to go full-on Charlie Brown (or, if you prefer, Frank Costanza) with the complaints about the commercialization of "his" holiday.

But Trevor being Trevor, he gets so caught up in the way he thinks things should work that he doesn't pay attention to how they're actually working. He doesn't recognize that the concept of Cupid's Day -- a Festivus-like alterna-holiday for singles to celebrate on Feb. 14 -- would sound really depressing to someone without a partner on that day. (At least if you stay home and eat cookies and watch a stupid movie, it's easier to forget that it's Valentine's Day and you're single than if you attend an event where that's the whole point.)

And when, after a number of fits and starts, he finally gets our Couple of the Week -- feisty single mom Stephanie (Tiffani-Amber Thiessen back before she dropped the Amber) and persistent caregiver Luther (Ben Bode) -- in the back of a limo together and they start bonding over their respective familial responsibilities, Trevor can't see this as a good thing for their relationship and keeps trying to change the subject to fun, sexy time.

Still, in the end, Trevor turns out to not be willfully blind about everything. The Cupid's Day party -- and his idea of using the fantasy sketches Claire had the singles group write -- produces at least one match (maybe not a button-mover, but still), and he has the brainstorm to put Stephanie's kids and Luther's aunt together to look after each other while the grown-ups get to party together.

I like that the meeting between the three dependents doesn't suggest a miracle cure -- the aunt is still a pain in the ass and the kids seem afraid of her, even though she manages to convince the boy to stop carrying around his toy bulldozer -- but rather a starting point for something that could eventually work. While the magic of love moments on "Cupid" (the Trevor side) are fun, I also appreciate that the show was willing to deal with the less glamorous parts of romance and relationships (the Claire side).

It's not the strongest episode of the 15, but I like the Couple, Trevor has lots of funny lines ("The things she does with verbs, practically keeps you awake the entire time") and other bits of business (Claire calling him like a dog and him responding like a monkey), and, of course it deals with our hero's own personal holiday.

And now it's time for Rob Remembers, where "Cupid" creator (past and, maybe, future) Rob Thomas offers some behind-the-scenes insight into each episode (or, in this case, an amusing episode-related anecdote):

A few years ago, my then-girlfriend/now-wife and I went to a wedding of a friend's here in Los Angeles. Afterwards, we were waiting for the valet to bring us my car, and I noticed a woman who looked very familiar. I glanced at her a couple of times trying to place her. I finally came to the conclusion that she had played a role in Cupid, but I couldn't remember which role.

The woman in question noticed me, and I could tell she was trying to place me as well. I finally said, "Excuse me, were you in an episode of Cupid?"

She answered that she indeed had been and introduced herself as Tiffany Amber Thiessen. To this day, this is one of my wife's favorite anecdotes. She swears I'm one of the few men in Los Angeles who would've been unable to recognize her. She also believes it was the first time Ms. Thiessen has been asked about her Cupd credit first.

A sidenote about the episode. I loved how great the snow in Chicago looked on film. It made our show unique. Working outside in it was difficult, but when we shot outside in a Chicago winter, you knew we weren't an L.A. show faking it.

Some other thoughts on "The Children's Hour":

• Remember how Rob admitted several episodes back that he wrote the "Trevor and Claire mock 'Dawson's Creek'" scene as petty and juvenile revenge for leaving that show on bad terms? Well, he gets in another dig here with the condescending store clerk that Stephanie tells off in front of a smitten Luther. The clerk's name? James Van Der Brook, which is a hop and a skip but not even a jump away from James Van Der Beek.
• A few episodes back, I asked how the potential remake would deal with gay couples and whether Trevor would get "credit" for same-sex matches. As we learn here from his conversation with Jaclyn -- in which she congratulates him on fixing up two men that no one else knew were gay -- at least Trevor believes that Jupiter and company have no problems with guy love between two guys. (As Trevor notes later, "By Jove, I think she's got it! I know Jove personally, and he is bi.")
• It's always a tough line to walk with cute kid characters, but I think the writing of Mac and Maggie manages to fall on the funny side rather than the annoying one. In particular, I like the kid who plays Mac's delivery of the line about the early developed kid in phys ed who offered 10 bucks for the picture of his mom.
• Maybe the funniest, and most completely random, bit of Trevor business in the episode is his explanation for why Luther should lick his teeth before seeing Stephanie. Comes from nowhere, goes on forever, and impossible to properly describe if you haven't seen it, but damned amusing.
• Champ is once again largely appearing in his own show, but at least this one is both brief and thematically tied to the main story, as Trevor talks him into reconciling with the teenaged son of an ex-girlfriend.

Coming up on Friday: the end, with the unaired but easily YouTube-able "Botched Makeover," in which Laura Leighton tries to play frumpy, Trevor and Claire make a wager, and Rob gets to make fun of "NYPD Blue" for a while. You can see it here, here, here, here and here.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Strike Survival TV Club: Cupid, "Bachelorette Party"

Brief spoilers for the "Bachelorette Party" episode of "Cupid" coming up just as soon as I enjoy some chicken soup...

As Rob Thomas said in the review for "Hung Jury," that episode and this one were the chief victims of the sudden ouster of writer/producers Jeff Reno and Ron Osborn, as Rob and the remaining writers had to scramble to put together episodes that would have been Reno and Osborn's responsibility. The slapped-together quality was more blatant with "Hung Jury" -- "Bachelorette Party" is definitely a better episode -- but you can see how the rush hurt this one as well.

One of the cardinal rules of writing is "show, don't tell," but "Bachelorette Party" flows in the opposite direction at every turn. The characters -- most of them friends of Claire who have known her since high school -- spend the entire hour arguing about events that happened days, weeks or even years before the episode took place, whether it's the affair that Claire's friend's fiance is having with her other friend, or the grudges that the entire clique still hold from their teenage years. And unlike in "First Loves," we don't even get flashbacks to any of these events. The rhythm is constantly exposition/exposition/fight, and while the performances by Piven, Marshall and some of the guest stars are fine, it's very hard to get invested in any of this.

The idea of female friends holding onto the same misconceptions and beefs over 15 years and more isn't a bad one -- there are moments at the bachelorette party where I buy into these long-lasting friendships -- but it really calls for an episode with a wildly different structure than we get here, something that doesn't take place entirely in the present and deal entirely with the past. If Thomas and company had more time to craft the script, to build more sets (virtually all the action takes place at Taggerty's or Claire's apartment), maybe to hire actors to play the high school/college versions of Claire and her friends, they could have done something really interesting with the basic premise, but the quick and dirty version doesn't work.

That said, the scenes near the end -- Claire on the train with Heather and, especially, Claire, Trevor and Joanne at Taggerty's -- feature some nice performances by the actors involved. I just wish they didn't have to do so much heavy lifting.

I don't have much else to say about this one -- Trevor's first experience with sickness and Champ's fear of exposing himself on stage were amusing distractions -- so it's time for Rob Remembers, where "Cupid" creator (past and, maybe, future) Rob Thomas offers his own take on each episode -- which in this case is as brief as mine:

I can't say much about "Bachelorette Party" as I've tried to completely block this episode out of my mind. As I've jotted down my commentary on the previous episodes, I've screened them in the background in order to jog my memory a bit. With this particular episode I'm not even willing to do that. Why revisit the trauma?

Here's my macro problem with the episode. None of the women come off well. Now with the guest stars, this is something of a problem, but the episode also reflected badly on Claire, which was a primary concern. I always wanted Claire to be tightly-wound. Early in the season, I think we dialed up that aspect of her personality too much, but I thought we'd found the right balance at this point in the season. This episode set us back again. It was almost guilt by association. Interestingly, as I recall, the modeling for this episode was the Rosalind Russell/Joan Crawford/Norma Shearer movie, THE WOMEN. We missed the mark wildly.

Coming up next: I'm taking most of next week off, which means you have an extra week to watch the penultimate episode, "The Children's Hour," featuring an all growns up Tiffani-Amber Thiessen. You can see it here, here, here, here and here. We'll talk about it a week from Tuesday, on the 26th.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Strike Survival TV Club: Cupid, "Grand Delusions"

In theory, the writers strike is less than 24 hours away from being over, but since most shows won't be able to finish new episodes until sometime in late March or early April, we still have plenty of time to deal with the final four "Cupid" episodes. (After I'm done with these, though, I may table plans to move on to "Sports Night" and/or "The Wire" season one, as my schedule will start getting much busier with new product in the pipeline.)

Spoilers for "Grand Delusions" coming up just as soon as I slurp through a straw...

Oh, this one I like very much. It's funny, and sad, and touching, and sweet. It hits all the notes -- and not just the ones played by Claire's jazzman father.

When your hero is a man who believes he's a Greek god (or may be a Greek god turned into a man), it shouldn't work to pile even more crazy on top of that. And yet teaming Trevor up with a man who thinks he's Don Quixote (a fictional character whose own delusions are his defining trait) produces one of the best episodes of the series.

Much of that is to the credit of guest star Patrick Fabian (almost unrecognizable from the way he looks today, even though he's aged well). As Rob Thomas notes below, he's the rare "Cupid" guest star who upstages Jeremy Piven, and he finds a way to make "Don" (really a man named Robert Cunningham who cracked up after he killed his wife in a drunk driving accident) seem charming even as it's clear he's far more psychologically damaged than Trevor. (If, of course, you believe that Trevor is crazy and not Cupid.)

The parallels between Cunningham and Trevor are, of course, the heart of the episode. Trevor's our main character, and even if you go with the idea that he's delusional, it's clear by now that it's about as healthy as a delusion can be. He's capable of living in the world, finding and keeping a job, making friends (though not girlfriends), and even his psychologist admits (back in "First Loves") that it's a delusion we should all be so lucky to be in the orbit of.

With Robert Cunningham, we see the downside of romantic delusion, and understand more why Claire is trying so hard to "cure" Trevor. Cunningham's delusion may be charming to some, like his stripper Dulcinea, Mona Lovesong (Daphne Ashbrook), but more often than not it invites punches to the face (which Trevor intercepts in the teaser) or outright beatings (which Cunningham receives from the bouncer at Mona's club). If he didn't have Trevor hanging around him to act as translator and peacemaker, Cunningham might have wound up hospitalized far sooner.

And in the sad, beautiful final scene of this story, when Mona visits Robert in the psych ward and gets him to embrace reality by telling him her own real name, we understand just how debilitating even the most charming delusion can be. If Trevor is a man with psychological problems, who knows what kind of trauma lurks beneath all that banter and bluster? Who knows whether he's heading for a meltdown that would make the bedroom freak-out in "Pick-Up Schticks" look like a minor tantrum fueled by low blood sugar? Claire may not always be a good person (see the book material from the previous episode), but she means well for Trevor, and we see in this episode why she cares so much.

Claire suffers from her own delusions in this episode, as her musician dad Bill (Barry Newman) comes to town with the promise of settling down with the first straight job of his life so he can make it up to Claire after all his decades on the road. It's clear almost from the start that Bill isn't cut out to be a suit, and my fear (from not remembering how this plot played out) was that we would go for the cliche ending where Claire gets her hopes up about the old man, only to discover that he took the traveling musician job at the last minute and only left her a note. Instead, Claire (and the script) is smart enough to figure out that Bill's heart really is on the road, and so she gives him her blessing to blow out of town again. You know it hurts her to do that -- Paula Marshall has rarely been better than she is at the end, as Claire watches Bill play a song he wrote about her and tries to balance her love of her dad with the way she always misses him -- but she's an intelligent woman who knows the human mind well enough to realize this is what's best for her dad, and, by extension, her. Had she asked Bill to stay, I imagine within six months their relationship would have gone sour as he subconsciously blamed her for making him take the talent scout job.

And now it's time for Rob Remembers, where "Cupid" creator (past and maybe future) Rob Thomas offers his own take on each episode

"Grand Delusions" is one of my favorite Cupid episodes. Patrick Fabian, who played Don Quixote in the episode, is, perhaps, the only guest star who stole scenes from Jeremy, though, to be fair, Jeremy happily played straight man to the "crazier" Don Quixote. Patrick has since been a go-to actor for me. He played Veronica's flawed criminal justice professor on Veronica Mars. He's in a comedy pilot I co-wrote that we're hoping to sell post-strike called Party Down.

Our editor, Jim Page, was a real hero on the episode. It was his idea to put in the Spanish guitar stings to underline the comedy. It's one of my favorite touches in the episode.

I just Netflixed the 1971 classic car chase movie "Vanishing Point" because I realized that Barry Newman was the star. Barry played Claire's dad, and he was a pleasure to work with. I've been wanting for years to do a journalism show, but networks are dead-set against it, because there's never been a successful one. (Even Lou Grant lost it's time slot every week.) Barry played one of the last crusading journalists in Deadline. I told him that I blamed him for killing the genre.

I don't if I'm one of the only people alive to notice this, but we have one of the worst performances all time by an extra in the final bar scene. Barry Newman is playing guitar and this idiot extra positioned behind Claire and Trevor is acting like a jackass -- flailing wildly as he's clapping, hamming it up. I can barely watch the scene because of this joker. Although I managed to make sure he never worked on Cupid again, I failed in my ultimate goal of ensuring he never worked again on any show or in any profession ever again. I simply don't have that kind of Joel Silver muscle.

Some other thoughts on "Grand Delusions":

• This episode makes very good use of Claire's assistant Jaclyn, who seems to have a crush on both Trevor and Don Quixote, and whose discussion with Claire about "How can a guy who thinks he's Cupid help a guy who thinks he's Don Quixote?" features some of the series' best non-Piven-involved banter.
• As Rob says, Piven wisely consents to play Patrick Fabian's straight man for much of the episode, but he still gets in a few funny lines as Trevor deals with taking orders, getting thrashed and even kissed by this nutbar. His delivery of "You did that again, didn't you?" after getting kissed again is a particular highlight.
• I think Champ inadvertently hits on the perfect concept for the remake: instead of doing it as another romantic anthology, we could have Cupid team up with Don Quixote (and/or other men believing themselves to be figures out of literature or mythology) to fight crime. Tell me you wouldn't watch it.
• I love the scene where Champ takes Trevor to meet Mr. Clef, the aptly-named oracle of the Chicago jazz scene. It very neatly straddles the fantasy vs. reality line (helped by Sephus Booker's strange performance as Clef) in a way that evokes the first appearance by Zeus the Bum. It's very rare to see Trevor that confused, after all.

Coming up on Friday: "Bachelorette Party," which Rob has already said he considers one of the season's two low points (though it's still markedly better than "Hung Jury"). You can watch it here, here, here, here and here.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Strike Survival TV Club: Cupid, "A Great Personality"

Spoilers for the "Cupid" episode "A Great Personality" coming up just as soon as I ask Mike for his thoughts on the steroid era...

Now that's much more like it. Not a happy episode, by any means -- every single story ends on a down note -- but a vast improvement over "Hung Jury."

The message of "A Great Personality" seems to be that love should be about more than appearances, but what it's really about is that love is hard, no matter the approach. Trevor's still stuck on seven love matches. Champ's ambivalence about his perfectly fine relationship with Chris causes him to sabotage it (with her help). The Couple of the Week (Christine Taylor as Yvonne, Grant Heslov as Ken) falls apart over the question of looks, but when we see Mike go after the waitress with the titular qualities instead of the blonde hottie with the corporate seats at Wrigley, it doesn't work because the waitress is already taken.

And in an episode about the value our society places on physical beauty, the ugliest character turns out to be Claire, who's making Trevor the subject of her next book. We knew this -- it was a plot point way back in the pilot -- but it's the first time it's come up in a long time, and the first time the show's been so blunt about how she's using Trevor for material. We know enough about Claire to know that she's a good person and a good shrink, and that she does care about Trevor and his mental health, but the way we see her here working without his knowledge does not reflect well on her.

Neither does the lovely Yvonne's decision to split with average-looking charmer Ken reflect well on her -- something she realizes at the same moment she recognizes that, while her hunky boyfriend may not be as big a jerk as she thought, he's not nearly as much fun to be around as Ken. Back in "A Truly Fractured Fairy Tale," I complained that the Couple of the Week broke up in the exact manner Claire had predicted, but even though Yvonne and Ken plays out almost exactly as Trevor announces that it will, I enjoyed this duo (and this episode) much more. The difference, I think, is that one story is about a couple struggling to click over a superficial reason but failing because of no deep connection, whether the other is about a couple that connects on that deep level and then falls apart over a superficial reason. I never felt invested in the "Fairy Tale" couple, where I liked Ken and Yvonne and was disappointed (if not surprised) that Yvonne dumped him to go back to her oily bohunk.

(Ken's probably better off, frankly. Yvonne was a babe, but she was an insecure manipulator. If she hadn't gone back with the bohunk, the relationship would have fallen apart after she tried one of her weird "tests" on him.)

The guys from the singles group trolling for a higher class of women wasn't as much fun as the B-team's previous spotlight in "Meat Market," but I'm still glad whenever an episode features more Paul Adelstein. And where I figured Yvonne and Ken wouldn't work out (things were going too well for them, you know?), I assumed one of the guys would wind up with Annette the waitress as a thematic counterpoint, so her having a boyfriend was a surprise. (Albeit a nice one; lots of shows would have made her lonely and starving for the attention of even a lug like Mike.)

Champ doesn't come up smelling like a rose himself, but his story illustrates why Trevor's only made seven matches so far. (More on that below.) Here are two good-looking people who live in close proximity, are attracted to each other, enjoy each other's company, and even had a bit of the ol' Trevor magic early in their relationship (the poem Champ read to her in "Pick-Up Schticks"), and still Champ doesn't really hear the music when he's with her, gets so restless that he starts fantasizing about the mysterious "fan" e-mailing him (who, of course, turns out to be Champ's own paranoid girlfriend). If Trevor can't get a good on-paper match like these two (or Claire and Alex) to click, how long is it going to take him to get to 100?

Ordinarily, this would be the place for Rob Remembers, where "Cupid" creator (past and, hopefully, future) Rob Thomas offers a look back at each episode. But Rob hasn't had a chance to do the write-up for this episode, so we'll skip it for now. (If he comes back later to do it, I'll mention that in the comments and again in the post for the next episode.)

UPDATE: Better late than never, here's Rob's thoughts on the episode:

Over the course of a couple episodes, we cast a couple actors who went on to brighter futures. Grant Heslov, who played Ken in "Great Personality" (Jeremy ad-libbed the "bug-eyed" gentleman comment), went on to co-write the script for GOOD NIGHT AND GOOD LUCK with George Clooney.

Todd Field, our big guest star in Pick Up Schticks, of course, went on to write and direct IN THE BEDROOM and LITTLE CHILDREN.

"Great Personality" certainly takes a direction that most romantic comedies wouldn't. At the end of the day, the episode suggests, love doesn't conquer all, and that we are, ultimately, slaves to our own standards of beauty. This really gets to the heart of why I like doing a romantic comedy on television. There's very little drama in most romantic comedy films. The film ends when the boy and girl get together in the final act. I'm trying to think of exceptions in my head right now, and all I'm coming up with as an exception is BROADCAST NEWS which may be the movie that most made me want to become a screenwriter. The scene I wish I would've written? Albert Brooks showing up to tell Holly Hunter that William Hurt is the devil.

But I digress...

In film, the bottom line dictates a happy ending. In television, I don't have to give a happy ending every time. We probably went with the happy ending three-quarters of the time, but allowing for the occasional miss makes things more interesting to me. Once a show makes the statement that it doesn't always give you what you want, it makes it more fun to watch. (For me, at least.)

Some other thoughts on "A Great Personality":

• Trevor complains to Champ that he's only made seven Olympus-approved matches in five months. We know that the button moved for the couple from the pilot, so that leaves six other couples to identify. I feel confident about the couples from "The Linguist" ("You're wicked awesome"), "Heaven... He's In Heaven" (dancing), "First Loves" (Lisa Loeb) and "End of an Eros" (Sting at the planetarium). Are we supposed to count "Heart of the Matter," even though Trevor didn't want to take credit for it? Or "Hung Jury," even though Claire was ultimately responsible? Or are we supposed to assume that some of the couples he's introduced in between episodes (or in throwaways, like the two joggers from "Pick-Up Schticks") got the Zeus seal of approval? We know Claire and Alex don't count yet, given how often Trevor complains to Claire about needing her to take it further so he can get the credit.
• Christine Taylor, though she's now married to Ben Stiller, will probably always be best known for playing Marcia Brady in the two "Brady Bunch" parody movies. Having interviewed her once or twice around the time she did this episode, I can tell you that, at least then, she wasn't exactly wild about people constantly bringing up her resemblance to Maureen McCormick, even though that's what launched her career. So I'm surprised she was okay with the line where Trevor describes Yvonne has having a "face like Marcia Brady." The script also oddly references another role of hers: Yvonne's manipulative threat to shave her head evokes a stint she did on "Friends" as a woman who looked amazing whenever she wasn't pursuing the Mrs. Clean look.
• Grant Heslov, meanwhile, probably needed little encouragement to do his Woody Allen impression at the skating rink. Around the same time as this episode, Heslov (an actor/writer hyphenate who teamed with buddy George Clooney on the "Good Night and Good Luck" script) released a short film he wrote and directed about his love of the Woodman -- titled, of course, "Waiting For Woody."
• It's funny how some parts of the episode feel relatively current, like Champ getting fan e-mail, while others remind you it was made a decade ago, like Trevor and Yvonne's plan involving newspaper personal ads and snail mailed responses. (Also, I would pay good money to see someone on eHarmony or Match.com lead their profile with, as Trevor suggested, "Hello, I'm a roller derby enforcer. I have a faint mustache. Please enjoy my girth.")
• I don't really have time to get into the whole matter of Preston Milke, the man Claire suspects Trevor of being, but I have a few problems with her theory and the story. First, the story seems inconsistent: Milke gained a lot of weight after being heartbroken over his girlfriend dumping him, but she dumped him because he got fat. Huh? Second, as Claire notes (and as the linguist noted back in episode two), Trevor has the kind of metabolism that allows him to eat large amounts of junk food without gaining weight. It's one thing to imagine him once being fat and then going on a diet and exercise regimen that turned him into someone with Jeremy Piven's build, but he wouldn't be able to get away with shoveling in all the garbage that we constantly see Trevor eat.

Coming up on Tuesday: "Grand Delusions," in which Cupid comes face to face with Don Quixote, while Claire comes face to face with her dad. You can see it here, here, here, here and here.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Strike Survival TV Club: Cupid, "Hung Jury"

Hey, they can't always be winners. Brief spoilers for the "Hung Jury" episode of "Cupid" coming up just as soon as I get some clean towels...

Once upon a time, there was a play called "12 Angry Men," which then became a TV movie, then a theatrical movie, and then the inspiration for episodes of dozens (if not hundreds) of TV shows of every format and tone. There's a reason you see the "12 Angry Men" riff so often: it's cheap and easy to pull off, as it often requires only a single set. In fact, before I get to discussing the episode proper, I'm going to go straight to Rob Remembers, where Rob Thomas, "Cupid" creator (past and, hopefully, future) offers some behind the scenes insight into each episode. Rob's description of how "Hung Jury" came to be doesn't sound too dissimilar to the origins of all the other "12 Angry Men" homages:

"Hung Jury" and the upcoming "Bachelorette Party" were the lowlights of the season. Both were the indirect result of the network removing the showrunners who had been brought in to oversee CUPID. We had, in essence, split the episodes in half. Ron and Jeff were spearheading some of the episodes, and I was handling the others. Both of these episodes were supposed to be Ron and Jeff's, but once they were removed, they landed on my plate with very little time to whip them into shape.

Hung Jury was written from scratch. We needed a bottle episode -- an episode that shoots primarily in one location. Bottle shows save time and money, and the show had been growing increasingly into the red. It was broken and written in a couple of days with each writer that remained on the staff taking one act. It's the fastest way, but generally not the best way, to write an episode.

Of some note, the guest star, Brian Baker, was the reader working in the casting office in Chicago who would run lines with auditioning actors. We ended up liking him so much, we cast him as the romantic lead. He later came into much greater fame as the hangdog SPRINT spokesperson.

I remained convinced that I could handle a 12 Angry Men-style bottle episode, but I ultimately proved myself wrong by attempting it on Veronica Mars and failing once again. I am unilaterally banning myself from any more attempts at a bottle episode in a jury room.

And the thing is, I didn't need Rob to explain this to me, because the slapped-together nature of "Hung Jury" is so obvious. There are some decent one-liners here and there, and some nice guest work by the aforementioned Brian Baker and Kim "Tootie" Fields, but there's no there there. I was bored -- so bored that I'm going to move straight to the bullet points, cleanse the palate, and get ready to write about the much more interesting "A Great Personality" later in the week. So, some other thoughts on "Hung Jury":

• This is yet another instance of Claire sometimes being smarter about relationships than Trevor. He sees Teresa the artist and Shawn the guitarist flirting (and, no doubt, notices they're the only black people on the jury) and assumes they could be one of his matches. He's so pro-emotion and anti-intellect that he can't see how Teresa and Clark's bickering over grammar and linguistics marks them as the more promising duo, but Claire sees it.
  (That also raises the question of whether Trevor gets credit for this match. While he technicaly enabled it by dragging out the jury deliberations, this was largely Claire's match. There's a discussion in the next episode of how many matches Trevor's made already; I'll have to go back and do the math.)
• In an episode full of rushed elements, Champ's sidewalk Santa story is especially pointless, though there's a nice "Gift of the Magi" moment at the very end where Trevor gives him a Gameboy cartridge for Christmas, not realizing that Champ gave his Gameboy to the homeless kid who kicked the cans.
• I did enjoy all the comedy about the sleeping arrangements, particularly the odd, helium-inflected voice Trevor used to wake up Clark. On the other hand, Trevor and Claire's debate about sleeping head to toe comes three years after "Seinfeld" did the same joke.
• So the albino comic book geek really was ripping off those kids with the platinum cards, yet was somehow overcome with the Christmas spirit enough to give it all away to charity? Huh.
  

Up next: "A Great Personality," with Marcia Brady lookalike (and Mrs. Ben Stiller) Christine Taylor trying to find a guy who will love her for her mind. You can see it here, here, here, here and here.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Strike Survival TV Club: Cupid, "End of an Eros"

We're into the second half of the season now. Spoilers for "End of an Eros," episode 9 of "Cupid," coming up just as soon as I figure out how to spell "cocktail"...

Back in the review for "Heaven... He's in Heaven," Rob Thomas talked about how he and the other writers quickly realized that the show worked best when it was just Jeremy Piven and Paula Marshall up on screen, bantering with each other, and how they started writing more and more (and longer) versions of those scenes.

While I'm all in favor of as much Trevor/Claire banter as possible, the one downside to that approach is that it takes time away from our anthological Couple of the Week. That tricky balance is especially obvious in an episode like "End of an Eros," which features one of the funniest -- and easily the longest -- Trevor/Claire scenes so far, but also turns our Couple (especially the female half) into glorified walk-ons.

So this time our boy is Gabe, an Ivy League-educated cosmologist who's a member of the singles group. Gabe has grown so tired of cruel rejections and dates with women who aren't remotely compatible that he's decided to give up on the whole looking for love thing. And, as fate would have it, he announces his intentions at a group meeting attended by Claire's mentor, Dr. Wyatt, who happens to have written a book (which shares the episode's title) that declares romantic love to be "unnecessary." She's so convincing in her argument -- and Claire so unprepared to publicly disagree with her mentor, and Trevor such a poor champion of the concept since he claims to have never been in love himself -- that Gabe decides he's made the right choice, and even blows off "kneejerk Darwinian" Cynthia, a smart, attractive woman who gets turned on hearing him talk about the Big Bang Theory.

It's a nice first date scene, but the bulk of the episode is so devoted to how Trevor and Claire each freak out about the possibility that Dr. Wyatt is right and they're wrong about the value of love -- Claire especially, since Alex has just gotten an offer to leave Chicago to work for the New York Times -- that Gabe and, especially, Cynthia disappear for long stretches. Even after Claire and a very hungover Trevor (more on that brilliance in a moment) team up for the first time to bring a couple together and prove Wyatt wrong, there's so little time left in the episode that The Police's "Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic" has to do most of the heavy lifting in the scene where Gabe realizes he's been an idiot and would like a second chance. Things come together so quickly for those two that, as we watched it, my wife said, "Boy, that was easy."

Still, I wouldn't have wanted to sacrifice one second of the back-to-back scenes late in the episode where Trevor and Claire join forces. The first is one of the best, and gut-bustingly hilarious, visceral depictions of what it's like to have a bad hangover, as director Peter O'Fallon goes to town with the shaky-cam and various sound effects (seagulls, trains) to let us know just how awful Trevor feels after trying to drown his sorrows in many, many, many beers. Is it ironic that a scene in which the main character keeps complaining whenever anyone makes a loud noise provoked such loud whoops of laughter from me every five seconds or so?

The second scene -- one long conversation at Taggerty's as the two brainstorm a plan for bringing Gabe and Cynthia together -- is even better. As I watch these episodes, I often pause or rewind the scene when I want to transcribe a good joke to mention in the review, but this one was so packed with great one-liners for both characters that I gave up somewhere after Claire's "I am not doing anything that involves rewiring, or kidnapping, or night vision goggles" and Trevor's "Scully, are you suddenly believing in aliens?" As Rob says below, writer Michael Green did an amazing job with this scene, one of the most quotable of the entire series.

It's a really strong episode all around for both our leads. Before the hangover scene, Piven gets to play extremely drunk in an extremely funny way (not sure whether I laughed more at the grubby undershirt or the "Professor Toilet" line). Marshall, outside of the scenes with Piven, gets to do some nice emoting, whether it's her crying in the doorway after she kicks out Alex following the Times news, her tearing up again after he gets on the plane, or (my favorite) the look of joy on her face as she takes out the answering machine tape to save his message about not wanting to be outside a 20-mile radius of her. (One of the downsides of modern technology is that setting your voicemail to save a message for 30 days isn't quite as bold a statement.)

And now it's time for Rob Remembers, where "Cupid" creator (past and, hopefully, future) Rob Thomas offers a behind-the-scenes look at each episode:

These days television works on a six act structure, which, while it serves a network's advertising desires, does not necessarily reflect pure story structure. Back when I was doing Cupid, we wrote a brief cold open, then followed with four acts, roughly of equal length. I mention this because with "The End of an Eros," we attempted a one-scene act -- one act was comprised entirely of a singles group scene. That would be long in today's act structure. It was extraordinarily long ten years ago.

The writer, the very talented Michael Green (Heroes), talked me into this. He was very passionate and convincing that we could pull it off. The network was less convinced, but I went to the mat for my writer. In this particular case, the network was right to be worried. In the initial cut, the scene dragged. It was painful to sit through. (One of the reasons I was convinced to attempt the one-scene act was that I loved the writing, but even with quality words, I just kept wanting to get out of the scene.) Consequently, we cut the hell out of the finished product. It still feels a bit long to me, and it contains some strange lifts that don't entirely work.

All that said, when I show people who've never seen the show ten minutes as a sample, I'll tend to use the scenes in the third act of Trevor hungover and Trevor and Claire hatching the plan. They are the gold of the show, and Michael wrote the hell out of those bits.

Some other thoughts on "End of an Eros":

-Cynthia is played by Jennifer Crystal (aka Billy's daughter), while Gabe is played by Gary Hershberger, who to me will always be Matthew Gilardi from "Six Feet Under" (or, as Nate used to call him, "that greedy little Nazi f--k").

-One thing that doesn't really come up in all the Claire/Alex arguing are the reasons (or lack thereof) Claire would have to stay in Chicago. Yes, her practice is here and her group is here (as is Trevor, her meal ticket), but being a therapist -- and, more importantly, a relationship "expert" and author -- can be a portable job, and she was recently turned down for that prestigious local gig with Jeremy Piven's dad. I'm not saying she should have to uproot her life and career to follow Alex, but it only comes up in passing and is dismissed without discussion.

-Claire telling Trevor to can it with the jokes about Alex reminded me a lot of the Dr. Evil "Zip it!" runner in the second Austin Powers movie.

-Anyone care to guess what 11 things "The Odyssey" got wrong about Trevor's people, as he suggests to Champ?

-Does Trevor's ability to throw strikes at the bowling alley count as a clue to his godhood? It's not like he was doing it backwards, like the darts gag from the pilot.

Coming up on Tuesday: "Hung Jury," the first time -- but not the last -- that Rob Thomas would devote an episode of one of his shows to that old stand-by, the "12 Angry Men" pastiche. You can watch it here, here, here, here and here.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Strike Survival TV Club: Cupid, "Heart of the Matter"

Spoilers for "Heart of the Matter," episode 8 of "Cupid," coming up just as soon as I find a tissue...

He's a god. The man is a god. Plain and simple.

How else do you explain the miracle at the heart of "Heart of the Matter"? How could anyone but the God of Love find the one person in a big city like Chicago who would be a perfect match for Susan's heart? Who but Eros could have allowed Susan to have one perfect night with her savior before he died?

In a little while, Rob Thomas is going to talk about how, much as he likes the episode, it probably goes too far in answering the series' central mystery of "deity or delusional?" And coming immediately after an episode like "Pick-Up Schticks," which made a very plausible, haunting argument for "delusional," I can see how giving away the gag in only the eighth episode may not have been the wisest choice for whatever long-term future the series might have had with a different network/timeslot.

But there's a reason "Heart of the Matter" is the episode of "Cupid" I've watched the most, a reason it's the one I cite whenever discussing the show's greatness: because every single time I watch it, even though I know what's coming, even though with 20-20 hindsight the heart transplant thing seems screamingly obvious, when Susan starts thanking Trevor for introducing her to Dan, my eyes get as moist as Susan's. Every damn time.

There's something about heart transplants that make them an ideal subject for these kind of grand melodramatic moments. We think of the heart not only as the organ that keeps all the other organs working, but as the center of our romantic lives, and in turn of our souls. When someone receives someone else's heart, it inherently feels more profound than if they got a kidney or a liver or whatever. The greatest moment in "St. Elsewhere" -- one of the greatest moments in any TV drama, ever -- is the one where David Morse's character, newly and shockingly widowed, enters the room of the woman who received his wife's heart and finds comfort in taking out his stethoscope and simply listening to that heart beat. (It's such a brilliant idea that one of the "St. Elsewhere" writers couldn't help but copy it a decade later on a "Chicago Hope" episode.) I'm not saying that the Susan scene here is quite as amazing, but it's in the ballpark.

Or maybe I'm just a sap, I don't know.

It helped that the script did such a good job of establishing Dan as a likable, funny guy who could banter with a master like Trevor. Trevor's line about feeling like he lost a friend was right on. Matt Roth and Piven dropped into an immediate simpatico, and in a less tragic context you could imagine him usurping Champ's role as Trevor's sidekick.

It also helped that, as Rob notes below, Katy Selverstone is so committed and fierce as Susan. There was a period in the mid-'90s where it looked like she was going to break out -- she was doing those MCI ads for a long time, then did a "Seinfeld" guest spot at a time when every girl who dated Jerry or George was getting their own show, then did an extended run on "The Drew Carey Show" as the first of Drew's improbably pretty girlfriends -- but things never quite materialized for her. She still works, though, and performances like this one help explain why.

The B-story continues the ongoing tension between Trevor and Alex, and now expands it so that things are getting awkward between Alex and Claire. The sidewalk argument between Trevor and Claire where each begins arguing the other's viewpoint on commonality vs. chemistry was funny and extremely quotable. (My two favorites: "I'd rather be a slow-baked ham than niblit grizzle" and ""Hope someone got that on film, because that's the last time that'll ever happen," the latter of which set up Trevor's joke to Dan about them becoming romantically involved.) I also love that Claire sent her Dear John note via fax (though given the period, is it any worse than break-up by e-mail today?), and that any enjoyment she could take from Alex kinda sorta proclaiming his love was immediately dashed by the realization that Trevor lied to her. If it had already become clear that Trevor was in love with Claire, this is the first episode to really suggest she might subconsciously feel the same way; no one makes you crazier than the person you love the most, right?

And now it's time for Rob Remembers, where "Cupid" creator (past and, hopefully, future) Rob Thomas offers some behind the scenes insight into each episode:

I actually needed to rewatch the episode. This is one that Reno and Osborn shepherded and did significant script work on. I had almost nothing to do with it. I remember having a couple reservations about it. It did seems to really swing us into the "Trevor really is a god" side of the equation. Additionally, in the script stage, I had a problem with the buy at the end of the episode. It seemed like it was a bit far-fetched, but when I saw it on screen, I was won over.

I had forgotten how much I like the performance by Katy Selverstone. She has a kind of Jodie Foster vibe to her.

I remember we had a battle over a scene in which Trevor reacts to the news of Dan's death by smashing up a bunch of discarded furniture in an alley in a bit of a frenzy. Again the network was concerned that it made Trevor seem too real, too disturbed. I think I was in the minority in wanting to keep this possibility alive. The audience wants to believe Trevor possesses some real magic. I always felt like, if we gave them that, they wouldn't respect us in the morning. In any case, the scene of Trevor smashing things ended up cut from the final version, perhaps largely because we were out of time.

The original draft of the script was written by Karen Hall who Reno and Osborn had worked with on Moonlighting, I believe. Karen's sister Barbara is the creator/EP of Joan of Arcadia and Judging Amy.

Some other thoughts on "Heart of the Matter":

-One of the running elements of the series, but especially apparent here, is how easily Trevor's able to talk to strangers about their love lives and make it absolutely clear that he's not hitting on them. I know the script throws in a line where he tells Susan he's just trying to get a bonus for bringing as many people to the bar as possible, but there's just something in the way Piven carries himself that makes it clear that he's not looking to get laid, and I still can't put my finger on what he's doing.

-Along similar lines, as Trevor and Dan were bantering at the video store about the oddness of two unfamiliar men talking about relationships, my wife wondered aloud how the hypothetical "Cupid" remake might deal with same sex couples. In 1998, this wasn't really a possibility ("Will & Grace" had just come on the air, but it would be years before it was allowed to show two men kissing), but standards have changed somewhat. The gods themselves -- and the Greeks and Romans who worshipped them -- seemed open to various romantic and sexual combinations, so I would think Trevor gets credit for pairing off two men or two women.

-A far more minor clue than Trevor's recognition of Dan being Susan's perfect match: when Dan asks how he got into the Blackhawks practice, Trevor says, "I can get in anywhere. I'm Cupid, remember?" Throughout the series, we've seen Trevor talk his way into situations and places where he should be denied entry, but I keep thinking back to that shot of him on top of the building in "Heaven... He's In Heaven" and asking myself, "How the hell did he get up there?"

-When Dan begins describing the kind of skeeball he used to play (which we then see him play with Susan), it sounded (and looked) like every skeeball arcade I've ever seen in my life. Is anyone familiar with another look for the game that I'm not aware of?

-Just wanted to mention "Glass Blowing: Craft or Fetish." I'm almost afraid to Google it.

Up next: "End of an Eros," featuring Trevor and Claire's first outright team-up and some hilarious camerawork, which (if you haven't already gone BitTorrenting like some other readers) you can find here, here, here, here and here.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Strike Survival TV Club: Cupid, "Pick-Up Schticks"

Spoilers for "Cupid" episode 7, "Pick-Up Schticks," coming up just as soon as I do the loser dance...

Whew. I remembered this as a dark one, but didn't realize how dark until I watched it again. This is one where the only person who comes out smelling good is Champ. Trevor's desperate, bullying and acting very much the lunatic and not the exiled god, Claire makes at least one, if not two big ethical violations, and the guest star of the week lets Trevor push him into doing a bad, bad thing. And yet, in the midst of this darkness may be the biggest laugh I ever got out of the show. Weird how well the comedy and the tragedy sometimes go together, isn't it?

So Trevor's starting to panic again about not getting back to Mt. Olympus, especially when the very desirable Helen Davis (Sherilyn Fenn, halfway between knotting the cherry stem on "Twin Peaks" and getting into a custody dispute on "Gilmore Girls") tries to make a move on him. Because of Zeus' "No shagging the livestock" rule (for those not up on your Greco-Roman myths, Zeus was infamous for nailing everything that wasn't already nailed down), if Trevor has sex with a mortal, he becomes one, permanently.

His state of mind isn't helped by all his glimpses of the happy, horny union he created between Claire and Alex. If it wasn't obvious before that he's in love with Claire, it is here, and if you read this episode as if Trevor was just a delusional human, his desperate need to escape is him twisting his fantasy to cope with his own jealousy. On Mt. Olympus, after all, he won't need to see Claire and Alex having a fun sexy time, will he?

Trevor's bitter desperation makes this a very bad time for him to meet Sam (Todd Field, back when he was an indie film actor rather than an indie film director), a nice, shy member of the singles group, and to hear Sam talk about Sure Score, a seduction technique that Claire describes as "drug-free Rohypnol." Under ordinary circumstances, Trevor's belief in true love -- and his understanding that his "mission" involves love and not sex -- would make him think of Sure Score as both useless to his cause and kinda gross. But hard-up, jealous and tightly-wound, he talks himself into the idea that it would have value in his mission, and in turn bullies Sam into using it on the barista for whom he has an unrequited crush.

While Trevor's trying to avoid Helen and pressuring the very decent Sam into doing something both know isn't right, Claire is having sex with Alex -- lots and lots and lots of sex. This is a very different Claire than we've seen before (and a different Paula Marshall): looser, happier, hungrier and more physical. (Two or three episodes ago, it would have been hard to imagine Claire strutting down the street and singing "Bad to the Bone.")

But as she mentioned back in "Heaven... He's In Heaven," she has a bad tendency to throw all of herself into a relationship, and she's so fixated on Alex and all the dirty things they can do to each other that she gets sloppy in other areas. She's not really on top of the Trevor/Sam thing, where under ordinary circumstances I think she would have spotted this happening as soon as Sam piped up about Sure Score in the group. Worse, she outs Trevor as a mental patient when Alex starts to get jealous of all the time she spends with another man. And when Alex -- who doesn't seem so swell in this episode, either -- lets Trevor know that he knows, then directly confronts him about Trevor's desire to be with Claire, it pushes Trevor so far over the edge that he decides to have sex with Helen and give up his godhood (or his delusion) once and for all.

He can't go through with it (there'd be no show if he did, after all) after Claire leaves a perfectly (or imperfectly, depending on your POV) timed message on his answering machine apologizing for her recent behavior and encouraging him in this new relationship. This leads to the bleakest moment of the series: Trevor in his underwear on the edge of the bed, babbling to himself about how he needs to go home already, while a freaked out Helen quickly gathers her things to go. (Piven really kills it in this scene.)

And just when we think things can't get any darker, or stranger -- after Sam has seduced the barista and then left her in a fit of self-loathing, after Trevor's meltdown and all the rest -- we cut to Claire in bed with Alex, telling him a story about her childhood, and the more she talks and the more she touches him, the more we realize that she's using Sure Score on him.

Now, Rob doesn't get into this in today's Rob Remembers, so we're on our own in deciding what Claire is or isn't doing here. The point of the scene could have been to show that the difference between Sure Score and a perfectly ethical seduction technique may not be that great. But from where I was sitting, it seemed like Claire, just as desperate in her own way as Trevor, afraid of screwing things up with this perfect on paper match, decides to give herself an edge using a technique she had read up on.

Whatever the reason, this is the only episode so far that made me uncomfortable by the end. That's not a knock, by the way. I think "Pick-Up Schticks" is very effective at what it's trying to do in showing the side of Trevor's world that isn't so happy-go-lucky. Just as episodes like "A Truly Fractured Fairy Tale" (which isn't remotely as well put-together as this one) are useful in reminding us that Trevor won't always make a match, episodes like this are important in keeping open the possibility that Trevor's as sick as Claire thinks he is. I'd have a better time watching "Meat Market" or "First Loves" again and again, but Trevor on the edge of the bed, on the edge of sanity, is one of the images I'll always remember when I think back on this show.

And it's time once again for Rob Remembers, where "Cupid" creator (past and, hopefully, future) Rob Thomas gives a behind-the-scenes look at each episode:

Interestingly, I liked this episode much better when I watched it this week than I remember liking it at the time.

I remember what made me cringe when we shot it -- the Sure Score scenes. I don't think they were particularly well-written and we really went overboard to underline that these guys were losers -- the military uniform on the leader was just one example of overkill. Those scenes became painfully on-the-nose, and they took me out of the episode. I really felt how badly we'd misfired later when I saw the movie MAGNOLIA. I didn't much care for the film, but in it Tom Cruise was essentially teaching a brand of this uber-male, make-women-your-prey philosophy, and I thought he was spellbinding. Did he win the Oscar for that role or merely get nominated? I seem to remember Michael Caine winning that year, but I could be wrong. I digress...

Interestingly, we had to be extremely careful with those scenes as not to encroach on the empire we were lampooning -- something called Speed Seduction if I remember correctly. ABC was very concerned as those people were apparently quite litigious.

My biggest regret was to have Claire break doctor-patient confidentiality so cavalierly. If I had to do the episode over again, I would've either made it an accidental slip or I would've really backed Claire into more of a corner in order to excuse it. We took a lot of flack from fans for that, and it was probably deserved.

I suppose I was pleased, however, with some of the fallout from Claire's error. I love the Trevor/Alex confrontation scene. I think the Trevor/Claire/Alex scene at her home is one of those scenes I'd put on a reel to show off what made Cupid work. Jeremy and Paula are great in it. I'm particularly proud of the "un" runner. The scene that we went back and forth with the network about was Trevor's meltdown when he decides he can't have sex with Sherilyn Fenn. The network thought it played too real. They thought he looked genuinely crazy, and they preferred him in lighthearted, "television-crazy" mode. We trimmed a bit out of it, but fought hard to keep the bulk. It was important to both Jeremy and me that the show could go in that direction.

There was also an argument about his motivation there. The network didn't understand why, given Claire's blessing, her apparent lack of jealousy, Trevor would then opt out of having sex. The reason, I argued, was that if she didn't care for him romantically, then he didn't want to be stuck here "on earth."

Some other thoughts on "Pick-Up Schticks":

• While everyone else is busy going down the morality rabbit hole, Champ is involved in a fairly pure, chaste courtship of his upstairs neighbor. It fits thematically with the rest of the episode, in that Trevor keeps trying to corrupt things by turning their apartment into a shag pad. But what's interesting is that, at the rock bottom of his depression, as he prepares to sleep with Helen and give up everything he believes he is, Trevor still has it in him to rectify things with Champ and the neighbor, by offering him a copy of Lord Byron's "She Walks in Beauty" -- real magic words, as opposed to the hypnosis of Sure Score -- for Champ to read to his girl.
• Maybe it's because I was 25 with the mentality of someone 10 years younger when I first saw this episode, but the moment when Trevor goes out on the balcony to do dumbbell curls -- a payoff to the "forearms like Popeye"/masturbation joke from earlier in the episode -- produced whoops and whoops of laughter from me at the time. My wife, who was just starting to date me at the time and watched each episode with me, says it took a lot of trust on her part to keep the relationship going after witnessing that spectacle.
• Even if we didn't have Rob here last time to unravel the conclusion of Nick's flirtation with the Kate Walsh character, his continued presence at the singles group is proof that he's not still dating her. Again, once characters from the group find love, they don't come back.
• As I said back in the "First Loves" review, Snuffy Walden's score for this episode sounds like an unused "thirtysomething" composition, and it gets kind of distracting in spots.
• In the montage near the end, we see Sam successfully hitting on a different waitress. Given the lacerating speech he delivers at the Sure Score meeting, I'm assuming he was just flirting with her the old-fashioned way, but I could be convinced otherwise.
  
• Nice throwaway moment where Helen, stalking Trevor, bumps into him as he's arranging for two local joggers to alter their routines just enough to bump into each other and maybe pair off.
  

Coming up on Tuesday: the series reaches its midway point -- and its high point -- with "The Heart of the Matter," which you can see here, here, here, here and here.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Strike Survival TV Club: Cupid, "Meat Market"

Spoilers for the "Cupid" episode "Meat Market" coming up just as soon as I inspect a few tattoos...

This one's just plain fun.

There are episodes of "Cupid" that are more insightful about relationships, or have magical moments, or emotionally powerful ones. "Meat Market" has some sprinkles of all that, but mostly what it's about is a balls-out, raunchy, joke-filled drunken good time. Seems about right for a Halloween episode, no?

So it is, in fact, Halloween, which Claire declares the worst day of the year to be single after New Year's Eve. (You would think Valentine's Day would come up, especially with its Cupidian elements, but whatever.) The members of Claire's singles group, all feeling demoralized from their lack of success (every person who finds someone doesn't come back, after all), don't want to go out on the night, but Trevor goads them into it in typical fashion, with a speech that's sort of like Henry V's St. Crispin's Day address if Henry happened to throw in a line like "Hey, hey, hey, you wouldn't know a good time if it gave you a reacharound." (For more on how that line, plus a few other all-time dirtiest "Cupid" zingers made it past the censors, look below to Rob Remembers.)

Trevor and Champ team up with three guys from the group -- guitar-playing sports fan Mike, oily lounge guy Nick and diminutive Laurence -- to dress up as a half-assed version of the Village People to attend a meat market at a warehouse called, appropriately, Gomorrah's. (As a reminder of who the regulars on the show are and who are the day players, Trevor gets to be the cop and Champ gets to be the construction worker, while the other three look dorky as the cowboy, the Indian and... a milkman. More on that below.) None of the guys save Trevor wants to be there, and to keep them from playing wallflower or, worse, leaving, he throws some reverse psychology at them, enlisting them in a game to see who can collect the most rejections. As any good relationship guru knows, the hardest part about finding love is just putting yourself out there, and by creating a scenario where the guys not only don't fear rejection, but embrace it, Trevor puts all four of them in situations where they at least have a chance of getting lucky, even though they don't realize that's what he's doing.

The guys' respective methods of getting rejected are all funny -- Mike's spastic dance makes me laugh no matter how many times I see it -- and provides a good showcase for some of the less-utilized members of the show's extended family. Champ, because he looks the way he does, has the hardest time getting actual rejections (though I like the moment where he games the other guys by asking a girl if she can explain Stansilavski to him), and eventually winds up in a situation where he has to choose between his libido and his artistic standards. (A woman who thinks Quentin Tarantino's an underrated actor? Really? The horror!) Laurence, the most reluctant meat marketer, gets a case of dance fever with a woman in a cat lady costume who, in the light of day, turns out to be fellow singles grouper Tina, who had been taunting him at the previous meeting. (Maybe she needs to buy some eggs to throw at him.) Mike's the only one who actually has sex, but in a situation that's eerily, creepily prescient for the character Paul Adelstein now plays on "Private Practice." (Does the guy just bring his own handcuffs to the set at this point in his career?)

The one somewhat sad story -- and, from our 2008 standpoint, the most interesting -- has Nick's array of cliched pick-up lines turn out to amuse a woman in a bumblebee costume named Heidi, who happens to be played by Adelstein's future co-star Kate Walsh, almost unrecognizable as a bohemian blonde instead of the carefully-coiffed redhead she is today. Even if I couldn't identify her by the voice, though, I think I would have figured it out in the moment where Heidi tries to encourage a sheepish Nick to dance, as Walsh uses the exact same gesture (fists together, eyebrows raised, grin enormous) that I've seen her use a few times as Addison Montgomery. (In particular, there's an episode of "Grey's Anatomy" where she gets the chief to dance that's like a mirror image.)

While the other guys' connections turn out to be as tawdry as you'd expect at a place like Gomorrah's, Nick seems to be really bonding with Heidi. He tells her the story of being left at the altar and how that made him more guarded around other women (and also led him to tune up the Camaro that she hated), and later she tells him a similar story about being dumped by the guy she thought she might marry after a pregnancy scare. After finishing the story, Heidi gives Nick the green light to kiss her, but he can't do it, instead kissing her hand and looking very unhappy with himself -- because, as we learn when the guys all reunite at Taggerty's to swap war stories, the Camaro story is completely made-up, a line he uses on women all the time to make himself seem more vulnerable (and desirable). Confronted by a nice girl who has a genuine version of his made-up story, all he could do was slink away and feel sorry for himself. (Rob Thomas confirms that the Camaro story was purely BS; more below in Rob Remembers.)

As convenience/contrivance would have it, Claire's also at Gomorrah's, as a "celebrity judge" for the costume contest (does anyone from Chicago know if the other judges are local celebs I didn't recognize, or just extras?) and inadvertently baits Trevor into fixing her up with her first significant love interest of the series: newspaper boss-turned-colleage Alex DeMouy.

Any amateur psychologist, let alone a well-credentialed professional like Claire, should be able to see that Trevor, even though he doesn't realize it, is falling madly in love with Claire, and sends Alex at Claire to prove a point. If she's such a killjoy that she can't have fun at a bacchanalia like this, if she's a relationship expert who preaches about finding good on paper matches but then can't click with a guy who seems so ideal for her (which is what Trevor assumes will happen), then maybe it's time for her to start questioning some of her fundamental assumptions. Assumptions like, "Is my favorite patient crazy, or is he really a love god?" or "Does Trevor annoy me, or do I want to tear all his clothes off and make crazy crazy love with him?" Trevor, because he's in denial, is only going for the first of those two, but the look on his face when he shows up outside her apartment the next morning and sees that she and Alex hit it off makes it pretty clear that deep down, he wishes for the animal love, too.

In between setting up the guys to succeed through failure and making a match he doesn't really want to make between Claire and Alex, Trevor helps lovestruck runaway teen Jill, played by Anna Chlumsky in between her Vada Sultenfuss and Liz Lemler days. The story doesn't feel all that necessary to this episode, either thematically (though Halloween is the reason they meet in the first place, and the reason he's able to save her from getting slashed by the neighborhood mohel) or as filler (there was no doubt lots more material to be mined in the rejection contest) but Piven proves he can trade barbs with a much younger, non-romantic female opponent just as well as he can with Paula Marshall.

And, once again, it's time for Rob Remembers, where "Cupid" creator Rob Thomas (who, before the strike began, was working on a remake for ABC, and hopefully will continue to whenever the strike ends) offers a behind the scenes look at each episode:

I got a couple things in this episode past the censors. Certainly the "You guys wouldn't know a good time if it gave you a reach-around" was one that surprised me. The other one was a bit more clever. Later, Trevor is trying to convince the guys not to head home and drown their sorrows with Cinemax.

The line was, "How about tonight we try for some flesh-and-bone women."

Jeremy and I discussed the line, and with a bit of a pause in the delivery, it became, "How about tonight we try for some flesh. And bone women."

When we were preparing for the episode, the director wanted so many changes in the script that I began to think he simply "didn't get it." I actually flew to Chicago for the production of this episode, because I didn't trust him with the material. Once we got in the same room, I discovered we really were on the same page. The director, Michael Fields, ended up doing a bunch of Veronica Mars for me including some of our best episodes. It was an extremely expensive episode. We shot for three nights with 100 extras in full costumes, but it ended up working out.

The episode also featured Anna Clumsky of MY GIRL fame. She was fantastic. I was so pleased this year when I saw her pop up on an episode of 30 Rock.

At the end of the episode, Nick is feeling terrible about the "big lie" he told the Kate Walsh character. When he says he won't go out with her because she's not his type, he's suggesting she's a sweet and honest -- a "nice"girl. He won't go out with her again, because he's not the type who does well with "nice girls."

Jeremy and I both wanted to get more work for the group guys. I think Jeremy was exhausted from memorizing seven pages of very wordy material each day, and he wanted the load shared a bit more. I also liked the scenes with the singles group guys. I just thought they generally played well. I love Paul Edelstein's rejection dance.

The Rejection Game was a game that my buddies and I would play in our college days. Go to dance club and see who could get shot down the most. You'd intentionally tap a girl on a shoulder who was making out with a guy on a couch and ask her to dance. These are the things we found funny in those days. Naturally, this involved a high intake of alcohol, but you'd frequently find someone who found you charming.

Another funny note about the episode. That English-accented voice coming out of the closet "Sorry, Luv" in the scene where Paul Edelstein takes his "date" home is Daran Norris -- Cliff McCormack on Veronica Mars, Spotswood in Team America.

Some other thoughts on "Meat Market":

-I have checked and checked on line and can find no evidence supporting Mike's theory that the original Village People lineup included a milkman. Anyone with a better memory of the '70s care to confirm or deny?

-I know bartenders and bouncers don't work every single night of the week, but every now and then I wonder how Trevor and Champ are able to be off on various nocturnal adventures when you'd expect them to be at Taggerty's -- especially on a big party night like Halloween. Or would a hopping urban bar like Taggerty's close down on Halloween? The place was sure deserted when Trevor brought Jill there for some food.

-Those of you who read the script excerpt from the pilot episode's opening scenes will recognize the discussion at the start of the singles group meeting where Nick complains about how hard it is to ask a woman to dance. That happens all the time in episodic TV, especially on a formula-driven show like this; if a line or scene gets cut for time in one episode, it can always be refashioned down the road.

-I love how thoroughly dumb they make Champ's woman. Not only does she love Tarantino, thespian, but when Champ explains that he did an audience response commercial for "Sphere," she asks what Sam Jackson was like.

-I haven't done a Lines of the Week feature the way I do for "The Wire," but this episode in particular was so damn quotable that I'm gonna throw out a few of my favorites:

"Oh, you thought this is where the Saul Bellow book signing is. That's a common mistake." -Trevor

"Check the album covers! In the early days, one of them was a milkman!" -Mike

"I want you to get out there and party like it's 1999." -Trevor
"Party like it's two months from now?" -Mike

"I am the Chocolate Lover from Planet Funktron. You will be my mistress of dance." -Champ
"Okie-dokie." -smitten woman

"You're a dead ringer for my mom. Wanna boogie?" -Mike

"Do you think the Counting Crows are derivative neo-hippie self-indulgent hacks, providing a lifetstyle soundtrack for annoying, self-aware yuppies in training?" -Trevor seeing if Alex is a good match for Claire

"You played that reckless rookie who got shot because of his disrespect for protocol!" -woman discussing Champ's "Sunset & Vaughn" guest spot (from "The Linguist")

"I don't know about the rest of them guys, but the cowboy was a straight shooter!" -Nick on The Village People

Coming up on Friday: One of the series' lightest episodes is followed by one of its darkest, "Pick-Up Schticks," which you can watch here, here, here, here and here.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Strike Survival TV Club: Cupid, "First Loves"

Spoilers for "Cupid" episode five, "First Loves," coming up just as soon as I buy some eggs...

I don't own an entire Lisa Loeb album, and yet she's been this weird recurring presence for important signposts in my life. Just as I was really starting to get my act together as a critic for the college paper, I wrote a whole lot about "Reality Bites," which prominently featured her first big hit, "Stay." Early in my relationship with the woman who would become my wife, "I Do" was on the radio so often that we half-jokingly began referring to it as our song. And now my daughter is obsessed with Loeb because she sang "Jenny Jenkins" on an episode of "Jack's Big Music Show."

Loeb's presence alone in "First Loves" would probably predispose me to like the episode. (That and the road trip format, given that my favorite movie is still "Midnight Run.") But Loeb or no Loeb, it's one of the series' highlights, an entertaining, formula-busting story that gives us insight into Champ, Claire and, yes, Trevor in sometimes surprising, sometimes moving, sometimes funny ways.

So Claire's singles group is hanging out at Taggerty's to cheer on Mike in some kind of music competition. His self-penned song includes lines like "Big love, baby, is what you need, big love, baby, doing the deed," and yet he still seems like the best contestant until a cute woman with horn-rimmed glasses named Sophie Gill (Loeb) takes the mic and impresses everyone with a wistful but ironic love song. Trevor interprets the lyrics as Sophie needing a good man, but Claire correctly interprets that she had a good man and lost him. As it turns out, Sophie and Champ are old friends (but only that), and she tells him that she signed a record deal but has been playing hookie like this instead of being in the studio "spinning pain and isolation into gold."

With the very generous record company hiring a limo to bring Sophie back to them (an awkward but necessary plot device), Trevor talks himself and Champ into coming along so they can stop and visit the man she loved and lost, her childhood sweetheart Paul Lister, whom she last saw when her family moved away at 13. And Claire, trying to prevent her superior, Dr. Greeley, from giving Trevor's case over to a fellow shrink who wants to try a new chemical castration drug on him, tags along so she can get a 24/7 view of Trevor and decide how dangerous he really is to himself and others. So they all hang out in the limo, trade stories of their own first loves (for Claire, a bad boy at summer camp; for Champ, the girl who got him into acting in high school) and very slowly edge towards Paul's house.

The episode is at once simple (just our three main characters plus a guest star swapping stories in the back of a car) and complex, with the interweaving flashbacks to Sophie, Claire and Champ's first loves and the specter of Trevor getting chemically reprogrammed by the oily Dr. Frechette.

Midway through the episode, Trevor overhears just enough of Claire dictating notes about the situation to mistakenly believe that she is the one who wants to dope him up. Because of that, he begins to get too aggressive in his attempt to reunite Sophie and Paul, which in turn makes Claire more inclined to go with the drug therapy option. Ordinarily, I disdain stories that involve some kind of misunderstanding that would be solved if the characters involved just had an honest conversation with each other (suffice it to say, I wasn't a "Three's Company" fan), but over such a short interval, and with the stakes this high, it works. There are times when this series tries to ignore the possibility that Trevor has deep mental problems -- or, at least, that Claire believes that he has them (though she finds the delusion relatively benign and somewhat charming) -- but it's a fundamental part of the premise, and something that needs to be addressed from time to time.

This story walks the usual comedy/drama knife edge. We see Claire amused by the fact that Trevor has conned a bunch of young women into believing he's Dave Matthews (at the time, Piven's hairline wasn't too far off), and we see Trevor deliver a rambling monologue about how Claire is a woman of numbers and he's a man of letters -- all 24 of them. (When she corrects him, he says, "Who else would take the time to count all the letters in the alphabet but the numbers lady?") But both of them are obviously afraid throughout: Trevor of having his personality and shot at returning to Mt. Olympus destroyed, Claire of having to so change the psyche of a man who, irritating as he can be, she so obviously likes and cares for. (Claire has her faults, but a lack of empathy for her patients isn't one of them.) The scene when Claire figures out what's been going on this whole time and hugs him is a really sweet, unguarded moment between two characters who are usually bickering.

For someone whose only previous screen credits were a role as "Angry Woman" in an indie film and a guest spot on "The Nanny," Loeb acquits herself well when thrown into that limo with Piven, Marshall and Sams. As Sophie rattles off her list of doomed relationships with needy losers, the script keeps nibbling around the idea that Champ wishes she had once noticed what a good, handsome guy he is. Addressing that concept full on would get in the way of the twisty conclusion -- Sophie kisses the man she thinks is Paul, then discovers that he's Paul's formerly annoying kid brother Brian, who always had a crush on her and turns out to be the good guy for the adult Sophie -- but Loeb and Sams play well off each other.

Though the episode is largely about Trevor and Claire's doctor/patient relationship, it contains several teases throughout about the obvious potential for them to be so much more to each other. The opening scene (which we'll get back to in a second with Rob Remembers) has Trevor and Claire watching "Dawson's Creek" (not that you can really see what show it is) while Trevor complains in meta fashion about how the hero of that show talked way too much and took too long to figure out that he was in love with the smart, slightly icy brunette. When Sophie hooks up with Brian, we find out that he was such a pest way back when because he was attracted to her. And just in case we don't grasp the point, while the two of them have sex (in full view of a window looking down on the street), Trevor talks to a kid on the football team Brian coaches about the way that boys often tease and harass the girls they like. When he runs into the kid again at a nearby convenience store, the kid witnesses enough Trevor/Claire metaphorical pigtail-pulling to know what's what.

Now, once again, it's time for Rob Remembers, where the creator of the original "Cupid" (and the man who's attempting to revive the show with a new cast), Rob Thomas, gives us some behind the scenes dish about each episode:

A few fun facts about "First Loves."

The network was always on us about stunt casting. Our intention, when scripting, was to get an actress who could sing, rather than to attempt to do the opposite. But the network read the script, and they're standard reaction was, "Offer it to Madonna." This may only be a slight exaggeration. Every episode of Cupid, they would force us to try to stunt cast the anthological guest star. They had "Love Boat" casting in mind. We'd always spin our wheels offering it to people on "their" list. We'd get passes. Then we'd have to cast last minute.

Those of us on the show were happy about getting Lisa Loeb, though I doubt she was quite the draw the network would've liked.

A couple notes...

Trevor and Claire begin the show watching Dawson's Creek and commenting on the characters. I had just come off a year on Dawson's Creek and we shared a building with them. Things didn't end particularly well for me on the show, and I don't think they planned on having me back. There was a certain amount of unhealthy pleasure I took in poking at Joey and Dawson as a means of commenting on our leads. I'm a small person in that way.

Also, this was Hart Hanson's first episode for us. He was a Canadian writer. Cupid was his first U.S. job. He'd been offered other jobs on procedural, action shows, but I hired him off a particularly bizarre Ally McBeal spec. I ended up giving him 30 pages of notes on his first 60 page draft of the episode. We may have both thought at the time we'd made a mistake. His second draft, though, was exactly what I was looking for. Hart continues to be one of my favorite writers and people in town. He's now the creator, EP of BONES.

Finally, I had one major problem with the end of the episode. Lisa Loeb changed one of her lines. She's performing at the bar at the end of the episode, and this ironic, tough, alt-rocker sings the Turtles' "Happy Together." Her scripted line was "Trevor, this is for you. I used to be much cooler than this." She changed it to, "I never used to be this cool." Later, when I asked her why, she said it was because she thought the Turtles were cool, and she didn't want to put them down. Of course, the IDEA was that this jaded girl was singing a song that was hopelessly romantic. Instead, I had Lisa Loeb commenting on how cool the Turtles were.

Once I explained myself, she looped in the appropriate line, but we have to cut off her face during the line, and it was really an important line to me. C'est la vie.

A few other thoughts on "First Loves":

-I really like the look of the flashback scenes, which aren't quite black and white, but rather sepia-toned with only one or two colors popping out in each (the blue of young Sophie's shirt, the yellow of the camp uniforms from Claire's story, etc.).

-In past reviews, I've talked about the various pop songs that got worked into episodes. The instrumental score for the series was by the prolific W.G. "Snuffy" Walden, and the music for these flashbacks sound like a mash-up between his theme for "thirytsomething" and some of his score work for "My So-Called Life." (The aural similarities will be even more overt two episodes from now, which sounds like Walden just dusted off an old "thirtysomething" composition.)

-I really like Paula Marshall's dance at the end, which seems like a very uptight woman trying to be funky and not quite succeeding. I've seen her dance better in other roles, so it's definitely not an Elaine Benes situation.

-My favorite guy on Sophie's list of losers, the guy who "found the female orgasm unattractive."

-The perils of watching low-quality video versions of this stuff: there's a scene in the limo (the one where Claire explains how the summer camp fling was doomed when the second kiss wasn't as good as the first) where Trevor's massaging somebody's foot, and based on the body positioning and the image quality, it's hard to tell whether it's his own or Claire's. I'm going to assume it's his, because I don't think she'd let him go there, protective feelings or no, but the first time I watched the scene it was like the only thing I could look at.

Coming up on Tuesday: "Meat Market," maybe the funniest "Cupid" episode of them all, featuring a pair of "Private Practice" stars before anyone knew who they were (not that they share any more screen time here than they do on their current show). You can watch it here, here, here, here and here.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post