Cupid, "The Tommy Brown Affair": The mediocre escape

Quick spoilers for last night's "Cupid" coming up just as soon as I do the moonwalk...

I could go on for a while about all of the things wrong with this episode (starting with the way that neither guest star was believable as either suave jewel thief or hardened parole officer), and with the series in general (too much emphasis on the guests over Trevor/Claire, too much exposition, too much music), but what's the point? The show's doomed. It won't be back next season. ABC's just running out the string with it at this point, and depending on how the ratings were last night, I wouldn't be stunned to see the show get pulled for the rest of sweeps. (The best thing it has going for it is that "The Unusuals" also did badly when placed here, so maybe ABC thinks the timeslot's damaged goods till next season.) At this point, picking apart all of the remake's flaws feels like beating a dying horse.

That said, I do want to note that Bobby Cannavale continues to be really engaging as Trevor, and that he and Sarah Paulson have absolutely zero chemistry together -- and that, more than any of the problems with the structure of each episode, is why the show doesn't work.

"The Tommy Brown Affair" was the first episode since the pilot to give us a real concentrated dose of the two leads together, and unfortunately there's no there there -- no romantic spark, no comic spark, no sense that these two are a good team on any level. So where Paula Marshall and Paulson are playing basically the same character, with the same take on their most eccentric patient, Marshall's Claire came across as enjoying the give and take even when Trevor was being irritating, where Paulson's Claire just seems annoyed with him, all the time. And that's no fun.

I'm going to play out the string along with the show, out of nostalgia for the original(*), and out of hope that we might get some decent banter between now and the end of the run. But given how great the original show was, it's frustrating that the remake is so obviously deserving of its short-lived fate.

(*) Speaking of nostalgia, as several readers pointed out to me last week, Claire's assistant Josie is played by Anna Chlumsky, most famous as the underage lead from "My Girl," but who also appeared in "Meat Market," one of the funniest episodes of the original series.

What did everybody else think?