I'm ecstatic because I'm starting to see the debut of shows that I actually worked on. It's always exciting to see whether I will pop up or not on camera.
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Cupid and Kings debuted. I was a little worried about Kings, where it's been said that the debut came up with miserable ratings. I am hoping things improve with that as I'm already liking the unfurling of the plots going on so far.
Cupid is a remake of a television show of the same name that starred Jeremy Piven, the guy that balked on doing the Mamet Speed the Plow on Broadway. Or puked, whatever, regarding mercury poisoning from his 'diet' of 'supplements' and impossibly LOTS AND LOTS OF sushi or fish.
Now back to the show. So Cupid, played now by Bobby Cannavale, is on Earth, being punished/expelled from Mount Olympus and has to put 100 couples together but it has to be TRUE LOVE for each couple in order to get back to Olympus. In the meantime, he meets cute with a psychiatrist played by Sara Paulson who I LOVED in the movie Down With Love. I guess it's not hard to figure out she's going to be his Psyche (she's a psychiatrist and human, get it?). Also, when she talks to him about Psyche, he says he has no idea about her, never heard of her. She reminds him he fell in love with Psyche, who was human, and that he even married her. Again he draws a blank. So that'll be ... cute.
I looked for myself during the New Year's scene in New York City which is in the beginning of the pilot. During this, a man takes some of the lighting during the countdown to 2009 and reconfigures it to read "I'm here Holly" in order to find a girl he spoke to briefly while working in a bar in Ireland. The girl was a tourist passing through but had made a strong impression on the young man who decided to take all his savings and buy a ticket to America to find her and Cupid helps him to do that. I won't give away the spoiler, but it ends cute, which I think might help this show as long as Bobby and Sara keep it from going too sugary.
For the New Year's scene, I recall it being filmed in Coney Island. They took a group of us to go to the rides, and the bulk of us stayed behind at some parking lot nearby, bundled up with our coats, scarves, hats and New Year's attire of balloons and hats, glasses and whistles, to ring in the New Year. We were told we would then be CGI'd to make a "huge crowd" in Times Square. Times Square would also be CGI'd in. What I found most interesting was the fact that it seems the show CGI'd the breath smoke that appears when one is out in the cold, talking. Since the weather was mild and still warm at the time of filming, we had to wear turtlenecks, boots, sweaters, coats, and pretend we were freezing. After pausing the video and slowing it down several times, I didn't see me. Oh well. The life of an extra.
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Kings has a whole Biblical and political theme about it and is very posh looking and dramatic. I would dare to say it's almost sudsy, like a nighttime soap opera. It's about this man who gets elected "King" (Ian McShane) and his family, along with a young modest soldier who happens to have saved the King's soldier son who had been captured on a brave overnight raid during the war that's going on and inadvertently gets sucked in to the political scene when he would rather go back to the battlefield where the rest of his comrades (and formerly his dad was) are fighting 'for the cause'.
I have yet to see the segments I was in, so I will continue to look out and enjoy the ride.
