NBC is hoping the small army of lovesick souls who made the star-studded "Valentine's Day" a craptastic $110 million hit will want to show up for a weekly series about another group of less-famous-but-still pretty people who find themselves dealing with the ups and downs of love's rollercoaster.
Unfortunately, the way it's trying to pull off this feat is doomed to failure -- at least according to the official TV rulebook.
The Peacock's vehicle for wooing women (and perhaps a few of the men in their lives): "Love Bites," a romantic comedy that's being written by "Sex and the City" alumna Cindy Chupack (left) and produced by Working Title, the folks behind iconic rom-com features such as "Love Actually" and "Four Weddings and a Funeral."
Sounds promising, except the project -- still just a pilot, but with lots of red-hot buzz surrounding it -- is an anthology, which means every episode will feature three different, self-contained stories every week.
And as anyone with half a brain in Hollywood will tell you, anthologies long ago joined westerns and Arsenio Hall's career in the dustbin of TV history.
That's probably why the development regime of former NBC chief Ben Silverman balked at the "Love, American Style"- esque concept of "Love Bites" when it was first pitched to the network two years ago.
And exactly why the new team at the Peacock decided to dust off the script and go for it.
"They wanted to swing big this year," says Shelley McCrory, a former NBC exec who's exec producing "Love Bites" via her role as head of Working Title TV. "They know they have to be different, and doing something people say you can't do is a great way to get people talking, and hopefully a great way to get a hit."
This is where being a fourth-place network with nothing to lose came in handy: It lets you try things other, more successful outlets would never dream of doing.
Like when the upstart Fox network decided to tackle primetime animation with "The Simpsons," resurrecting a genre that had been dormant since "The Flintstones." Or when a struggling ABC greenlit "Desperate Housewives," despite the numerous naysayers who insisted serialized storytelling couldn't work in the era of "CSI" and "Law & Order."
It also helped that Chupack never gave up on "Love," even after NBC first passed.
"I've been wanting to do this for so long," she says. "I'm such a fan of the 'Modern Love' column in the New York Times and 'This American Life.' I never understood why this couldn't work on television. ... Even though (the first development process) was very respectful, I never let it go. I even started doing films because I couldn't imagine a TV show I'd rather do than this one."
So Chupack was ready when Bromstad, prompted by a 
member of her development team, decided to resurrect "Love."
Still, NBC didn't want to completely ignore the lessons of TV history.
