I must have seen this when I was a kid, because I fell in love with ocelots and wanted one from that time forward. I’m sure that’s where I found out about them. I don’t actively remember watching it, though.
Yeah, I really liked the original, and was disappointed it only lasted one season. It was a pretty tricky balancing act, and “Cupid” could very easily have come across as creepy and disturbingly unbalanced instead of endearingly eccentric, but I thought they pulled it off. I thought Jeremy Piven and Paula Marshall were great, and that the show could be genuinely sweet. (I didn’t think there was much ambiguity about his identity, though - he was clearly actually Cupid, but since I like urban fantasy, I was fine with that).
The revival was…weird. A revival of an unsuccessful show that didn’t have much if any cultural buzz, only a decade later…why? I gave it a chance, but I bailed after a couple of episodes. Unlike the original, I thought the revival fell flat, the leads weren’t particularly likeable and didn’t have any chemistry, and Bobby Canavale’s “Cupid” came across as genuinely unstable and dangerous, and the whole vibe was pretty creepy. Apparently, I was far from the only one, as it only lasted 7 episodes (the original at least managed 15).
Along similar lines, anyone else remember Valentine, about a romance novelist who gets a job with a dating agency only to find it out it’s run by the actual Aphrodite, who has lost most of her power because mortals have lost faith in the gods and in Love itself? I thought it was cute, but, alas, it was not long for this world…
I remember Dweebs. I was thinking of it when he died recently. It had a line where he says something like, “If I had a dollar for Everytime someone called me a nerd. Oh wait I do”. Which is cheesy but I remember it decades later so here we are.
I believe the line was “If I had a million dollars for every wedgie I’d gotten in high school…oh, wait: I do!” It was the slyly triumphant smile on Scolari’s face that made it so memorable.
Don’t remember it, but it sounds like a riff on Educating Rita.
Educating Rhea
Rhea? “Pearl”, man!
Remember this 13-episode spinoff?
Twilight Zone-style SF/F/thriller anthology shows are a dime-a-dozen, and most of them were pretty mediocre at best. One that stands out as a “What the hell where they thinking?” monument was an early entry on UPN called The Watcher. Perhaps the most notable thing about this wet dishmop of a show was its host/narrator: that noted raconteur and aficionado of the macabre…
…Sir Mix-A-Lot.
Yeah.
I wonder if the choice to go with Sir-Mix-A-Lot was inspired by Cosmic Slop, a short-lived anthology on HBO hosted by Parliament Funkadelic front man George Clinton, which came out the year before. Clinton makes some sense as a host for a show like that, given the sci-fi themes in his music, but it’s easy to imagine some suit at UPN hearing about what HBO is developing and deciding they need a sci-fi anthology show host by a popular Black musician too.
Has anyone mentioned “Nowhere Man”? Good show with Bruce Greenwood was one of the inaugural entrees of UPN. Gone after one season.
Yeah I remember Nowhere Man - the producer was one of the first people to blog about his show while he was making it (JMS may have beaten him to that honor, but it was close)
Also remember “Deadly Games” - another UPN show from that season (I think) about a guy who created a videogame with everyone who had ever done him wrong as villains (…healthy…), and magically, they escaped the game to menace him. Florence Henderson played his ex-MIL
P.S. Dean Stockwell was in an episode of Nowhere Man (making it one of the best episodes just by his presence)
I got a few laughs out of that show.
I loved Learning the Ropes because I was a wrestling kid. I liked when real wrestlers showed up.
I loved that show! Thomas Vale (Greenwood) had a photo exhibition at a gallery, and one of his guerrilla journalism shots was of men being strung up in the jungle. Well, guess the show’s shadowy baddies saw it, and since they were the ones who strung the guys up, they came after Vale… by getting everyone close to him to disavow any connection to him.
Classic psychological mystery, and it made sense… at first.
Then the writers (or studio?) started changing their minds every couple of episodes as to what’s really going on. Eventually the plot, then the characters, and eventually the photo itself changed, and suddenly, Poor Paranoid Tommy had just imagined it was men in the jungle.
Sheesh. Well, it got me ready for the last season of LOST, I guess.
Apologies if this was already mentioned (it didn’t show up on a topic search).
One of my earliest and dimmest memories of TV dates from childhood when I used to get up really early on Saturday mornings to watch cartoons and repeats of dumb shows like Sky King. Sometimes I’d get up too early and have to settle for test patterns.
The first cartoon show I recall seeing was “Crusader Rabbit”, in which the lead character and his buddy Rags the tiger would have improbable and not very interesting adventures in primitive animation (it was the first animated series made specifically for TV, beginning in 1950. Wikipedia refers to the four-minute episodes as “satirical cliffhangers”). Jay Ward, who later went on to fame producing Rocky & Bullwinkle was involved in putting together the show, and there were foreshadowings of Rocky and his moose pal (Crusader Rabbit even sounds something like Rocket J. Squirrel).
The episodes I saw on our vintage Admiral tube TV were the original black-and-white ones from 1950-51, which were repeated for years afterwards. There were some new ones in color that came out starting in '59, but I had moved on to more sophisticated fare by then.*
Needless to say, a revival of Crusader Rabbit is highly unlikely these days. CAIR would have a cow, for one thing.
*but not Huckleberry Hound, which was lame.
I loved Nowhere Man.
A few others I liked, but seemed to be not very popular (or at least when I mention them, no one seems to know what I’m talking about):
Bull – No, not the one on trial science with that guy from NCIS. This one was about a group of stockbrokers. One season, 2000-2001.
The Hitchhiker – An anthology show. Page Fletcher played a hitchhiker who introduced that week’s story. On from 1983-1997, so it must have been more popular than I thought.
House of Lies – 2012-2016 (so fairly recent). Don Cheadle as a management consultant.
I remember seeing an episode of Learning the Ropes, and it was hard to decide if it was funny. It was more “bad acting” funny than it was “funny script” funny.
For instance:
Lyle Alzado goes up to the Road Warriors and asks them if they’d like to come to a party. They both face the camera and puff their chests out. Hawk says “A party? What kind of party?” Lyle responds, “You know, the type where you meet people and mingle.” Animal says “Why should we mingle when we could mangle?”
Later, the soiree is happening, and Alzado’s girlfriend, who doesn’t know he moonlights as a wrestler, meets the Road Warriors, and talks to him after the meeting. “You know who those guys were?” she asks. “Pro-FESH-un-ull REST-lers.” It’s like she tried way too hard to express contempt the wrong way.
So, in my latest review of this thread, four other shows I remember were mentioned - Cupid, Pearl, Nowhere Man, and Bull. I really don’t remember much about Nowhere Man, and don’t think I watched more than few of the eps. I liked Cupid and Peal enough to watch for a while, but don’t know if I watched all of them, and don’t remember a lot about them. I liked Bull.