A few years back there was a very fine, short-lived series called Cupid, in which Jeremy Piven played a guy who brought couples together because he believed he was Cupid (and may have been right). The ads for Miss Match led me to expect something like that, about a person who was convinced of her own competency in that regard.
But really, at heart this Friday night NBC show is about a person trying to deal with other people’s image of her. Alicia Silverstone, not used this well since Clueless, plays Kate Fox, a divorce attorney work in her father’s firm. She has to deal with her father still seeing her as his little girl and thus not giving her respect as a lawyer. She has to deal with her boyfriend’s view of her as a willing participant in whatever he has planned. And, because a wedding column in the paper mentions that she had brought the married couple together and had done so on a couple previous occasions, she has to deal with a surprisingly large amount of people thinking she has strong talent as a matchmaker.
While trying to shed the first two images, she chooses to embrace the third, thus giving the series a plot. And so she faces the bumpy path of matchmaking, of struggling with the human heart.
The pilot was certainly watchable, although there is a risk that the stories could turn formulaic. We’ll see if the folks behind this show can play that initial spark into a romantic fire or not.
(I will note that she is a good divorce lawyer largely because they tell us she is; she occasionally seems riled to find that someone is taking perfectly legal steps to secure the best possible outcome for their client. That’s the sort of failing that’s common in supposedly good TV lawyers.)
