"Cupid is a modern romantic comedy that challenges both the concepts of romance and comedy and pushes limits on both. There's a soundbite!" laughs Michael Conathan of the new ABC show.

It seems our hero has been tossed out of Mount Olympus. "The charge being 'general behavior unbecoming a demigod,' says Michael Green. "Pissing on the Pantheon, waking up in the wrong bed, that sort of thing."

Jeremy Piven stars as a 20-something Trevor Hale, who is picked up on the streets of Chicago claiming to be Cupid. During the course of the season, Trevor goes head to, er, bow with a female psychologist, played by Paula Marshall, who doesn't believe his story. "Nor are we left to know what to believe--whether he is or isn't the god Cupid--but he believes it's his mission to get people together and relearn his craft in punishment for screwing up the state of romance and love today," says Conathan.

The show will grapple with what romance really means. "It's a definite acknowledgment that romance is not what films we grew up on suggested it would be," Conathan says. "So you have expectation and you have reality. A lot of the argumentation is between what people expect, and what people want, and what people find."

The writers will use elements of pop psychology and culture in developing episodes, and, says Green, "the way culture is interpreting all these things and meshing them together creates an abundance of subject matter."