Strike Survival TV Club: Cupid, "Heaven... He's in Heaven"

Time to talk about the third episode of "Cupid," "Heaven... He's In Heaven." And for an added treat, I've recruited "Cupid" creator Rob Thomas to participate in this trip down memory lane. My thoughts -- and Rob's thoughts -- on the episode coming up just as soon as I put "Walk the Dinosaur" on my iPod...

"Trevor, people die."
-Claire

When you do a show whose lead character thinks he's immortal, sooner or later you need to address that. So "Heaven... He's In Heaven" devotes all three of its stories to the subject of mortality, even though that's not apparent at first.

Story #1: Our Couple of the Week are unusual for the show, in that they're not strangers who meet and fall in love, but a long-married couple who have fallen out of love and need Trevor to rekindle their spark. The Bennets (Harry Groener and Joan McMurtrey) still care for each other, but there's a distance in their relationship, one that's only grown larger as Mr. Bennet has taken to spontaneously bursting into Fred Astaire-style song and dance numbers throughout his day. (When we first meet him, he draws a crowd on a busy sidewalk hoofing it to "Come On, Get Happy.") He says it's just a better way to express himself; she's embarrassed and, because she's not as light on her feet, feels left out. Trevor, figuring he'll get credit from the gods for helping the Bennets, recruits Champ to give Mrs. Bennet dance lessons, but it's Claire who actually finds the words to bring the couple back together.

Story #2: Claire is being shadowed by Dr. Pat Stroud (Byrne Piven) as he's on the verge of hiring her to run a prestigious psychological institute. Just when everything's going swimmingly, she gets the bad news that her pilot ex boyfriend Jack -- The One That Got Away, and all that -- has died unexpectedly.

Story #3: While discussing Jack's death with Trevor, Claire tries to get him to confront his (new?) mortality. When she literally draws blood, he goes into a tailspin, panicked at the thought of dying before he can complete his mission and return to Mt. Olympus, his godhood restored.

Okay, so the mortality theme is pretty obvious in the second and third stories. But as Claire starts projecting her own grief about Jack -- both his death and the way their break-up turned her into the predictable killjoy she is today -- onto Mr. Bennet, we begin to realize that the dancing is part of a larger, death-fearing mid-life crisis. In the touching climax to the story, Mr. Bennet visits his wife at her job at a natural history museum and admits that he needs to feel more alive. She in turn acknowledges the need to compromise, and shows off some of the moves she learned from Champ. As they dance around figures of long-dead cavemen and dinosaurs -- proof of how long the universe will exist compared to our brief time in it -- he assures her, "We'll be roaming the earth a little while longer."

As with "The Linguist," this story's greatly helped by the presence of the right guest star. I'm guessing most fans of this blog know Harry Groener from his role as Mayor Wilkins on "Buffy" season three (or maybe from "Dear John"), but the great body of his work has been on the stage, often in musicals like "Oklahoma!," "Cats" and "Crazy For You." His two big numbers here -- his sidewalk intro, and then singing "They Can't Take That Away From Me" in his glassed-in office while his co-workers watch admiringly -- may not be as elaborately choreographed as the best of Astaire or Gene Kelly, but he nails the style and grace of those men. You understand why people might stop to applaud him, and why his left-footed wife might feel left out of this new phase of his life.

It also helps that the script repeatedly establishes that what the Bennets are suffering isn't a fight, or bitterness, but just the sort of strange entropy that can envelope any couple that's been together long enough. There's a scene early in the episode where Mrs. Bennet stops by her husband's office, trying to be as spontaneous as he's become, and his delight at the gesture only lasts as long as it takes him to remember that he has to go to a meeting. (She notes with resignation that they used to be so attuned that she always knew when his meetings were.)

Before I move on to the other two stories, it's time to introduce a new regular feature in the "Cupid" club, which I've imaginatively titled Rob Remembers. I asked Rob Thomas if he wanted to share thoughts on each episode as we covered them, and while he wasn't available to do the first two, he's hopefully in it for the duration. I can't promise this kind of bonus for every future series in the TV Club -- given all I wrote and said about "Studio 60," I'm guessing Aaron Sorkin won't want any part of my eventual "Sports Night" posts -- but we've got it right now. Take it away, Rob!

Interesting that I should jump in on this one.

This was the first episode that I didn't write. It was an episode written by Jeff Reno and Ron Osborne, the executive producers who had come from MOONLIGHTING who were brought in to run the show. Networks, as you know, don't trust writers who haven't climbed the ladder to be in charge. At least not initially. Early in the season Jeff and Ron and I had a good working relationship which is tough under those circumstances. We fell into a system that suited everyone. I would break and be the "in charge" person on half the shows; they would break and be the "in charge" entity on the remaining half. We'd give each other notes.

The episode started pretty radically -- 12 straight pages of banter between Trevor and Claire.

We all had a gut feeling that having Trevor and Claire going at it on screen was the show at its best, but this was essentially one scene of two people talking very fast. It made the studio and network nervous, perhaps deservedly, but I was very pleased with the writing and the performances. I recall that Jeremy had a lot of difficulty on those sidewalk scenes remembering all that dialogue and was pretty frustrated.

The issue that I had regarding the episode was the fuzzy line between fantasy and reality. Harry Groener was breaking into song in the middle of the episode. I kept asking, "Is he really doing this?" "Do other people see him?" "Is this his imagination?" I knew we were already operating with a somewhat fantastic premise. I feared we were putting a hat on a hat by then, in our third episode, asking people to go along with this quasi musical episode.

I really do like the episode. To this day, however, I believe that it would've been better in a Season 2 when we'd earned the right to break our own rules.

For what it's worth, I never had the believability issues Rob had with the Bennet story. I took it as face value: that he was really dancing, and that in brief spurts, it put smiles on the faces of people on their lunch break, or colleagues in the middle of a long work day, or whatever. The episode never really addresses the long-term implications of this -- I imagine at some point, Bennet's boss was going to complain about all the man-hours being wasted on these performances and the audience for same -- but in these brief spurts, it worked.

If there's a story here that probably could have waited for a hypothetical Season 2, it would be the Claire plot, which tries to trade on the death of a character who we've never met, and who's first mentioned as Claire finds out he's gone. Had Jack been an occasional topic of conversation in the early episodes, and then we found out he died, I think they might have had something good. But by giving us the info dump at the exact moment we're supposed to feel Claire's grief, it didn't really work.

It did, however, lead to the delightful and somewhat poignant Trevor story. Whether you believe he's a god or just a delusional man, the prospect of death is the same, and Piven did a great job on his first largely non-comic storyline of the series. There are, as would be appropriate in a story like this, a number of ambiguous quasi-clues to his identity, like the shot of him sitting on the roof of a Chicago skyscraper that's probably not open to the public, and especially the moment where he gets injured at a construction site and has a vision of what he thinks is Zeus -- "Maybe part of your punishment here on Earth is to learn about mortality," Zeus tells him. "Mortals don't do it just to bump body parts. Sometimes they do it to thumb their nose at death." -- but what turns out to be a homeless man, played by David "Buster Poindexter" Johansen. And in the end, the Trevor and Claire stories dovetail nicely, as he learns to accept the terminal condition that is life and then invites Claire to literally dance on Jack's grave.

A few other thoughts on "Heaven... He's In Heaven":

-In case you hadn't figured it out by the man's jawline and last name, the late Byrne Piven, as Dr. Stroud, was in real life Jeremy's father, a fixture in the Chicago theater scene for most of his life. It was his long friendship with Dick Cusack that brought Jeremy and John together long before they were both in "One Crazy Summer."

-This episode features the first appearance of Melanie Paxson (then Melanie Moore) from the Glad commercials and "Notes From the Underbelly" as Claire's assistant, Jaclyn. Just as Champ's most important function on the show (even in an episode like this where he helps out with the Couple) is giving Trevor someone other than Claire to talk to, Jaclyn is, in her various appearances, less secretary than confessor for Claire.

-This episode features some of the series' best use of the Chicago location, between Claire and Trevor's extended river walk-and-talk, the skyline in the background of Bennet's office dance scene, and the shot of Trevor on top of that building.

Coming up on Tuesday: "A Truly Fractured Fairy Tale," featuring adventure on horseback, princesses and their P's, and more of Zeus the bum. You can watch it here, here, here, here and here.

What did everybody else think?