Premise
"Gracen & Gracen, spearheaded by its aggressive acquisitions policy, has a capital base of 14.8 billion dollars, making it the fifteenth largest corporation in the world and a very exciting place to work — especially if you're willing to put in that extra time and effort it takes to get ahead. And there's plenty of room for career advancement as well, if you know what you want. I want to be President of Acquisitions."

So says Jim Profit in the pilot episode of Profit, a series that aired on Fox for four weeks in April 1996. I suppose it's not too surprising that the public couldn't handle it. You see, what Jim Profit means by "that extra time and effort" includes bribery, extortion, kidnapping, identity theft, and the occasional murder. And he's the hero of the show!

Evaluation
Profit is quite possibly the best television program I have ever seen; the only other serious contender is Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It's hard to compare them because Buffy started off rather shakily and grew stronger over the course of seven seasons, while Profit started with a pilot that I would say qualifies as one of the great movies of the 1990s and then got canceled before it had a chance to either sustain its greatness or peter out. Alas.

The DVD contains four additional episodes that Fox never got around to airing, and they give a sense of how a series about a ruthless psychopath could have continued to air week after week. After all, it seems as though there would have been two main obstacles to Profit functioning as an ongoing concern rather than as a one-shot movie: first, how do you maintain a stable cast when one of the characters is putatively knocking off everyone around him, and second, how do you keep viewers from turning off the television in disgust when the hero of your program is evil? The answer to the first question turns out to be "you don't," and the fact that the creators were willing to kill off or otherwise drop major characters suggests that as the series developed, the needs of the story would have continued to trump television convention. Unfortunately, for many viewers the answer to the second question was also "you don't." But later episodes demonstrated how inventory stories might work on a series like this: simply write stories in which Profit is set loose against people so evil that "our bastard" doesn't look so bad by comparison — that, indeed, we're glad to have someone with such an impressive bag of tricks on our side.

One of the great things about Profit, though, is that you never know how an episode is going to come out, because the stories work either way. Audiences tend to root for characters to achieve their goals, even when they disagree with those goals — pulling for Dorothy to make it back to Kansas even though it pales in comparison to Oz, for instance. These characters don't even have to be the protagonists of the stories in which they appear, so long as they're the focal characters of the sequences in question: in the climactic chase sequence of The Third Man, audiences tend to find themselves hoping that Harry Lime gets away from the cops, even though he's the villain of the film. So it's hard to resist being pleased when one of Profit's schemes works out. And if his plans fail? Just as good! He's evil!

Of course, it wouldn't work either way if Profit were not such a charismatic character. But not only did the creators write a gloriously twisted backstory for him, I have never seen such a perfect match between actor and character as Adrian Pasdar and Jim Profit. Pasdar is flat-out magnificent. When he turns on the smarmy innocence it is perfectly believable how those around him fall for his act; when he gives the camera that thousand-yard stare his eyes are truly reptilian; and the moments when he abruptly switches from one to the other are darkly hilarious. Even ignoring his performance, he's perfect for the part: a face sculpted out of space-age polymers at a yuppie factory, a voice like fine-grit sandpaper, the hair — in a just world, Profit would have made him a massive star. I was very glad to see him eventually land on Heroes — his role is no Jim Profit, but at least he's getting work on a decent show. I've been watching it online, since I don't own a television. Neither does Jim Profit.

Commentary
Profit was the chief inspiration for Varicella. Of course, Varicella is quite different in many respects: the milieu (high-tech Renaissance palace instead of corporate office with comically enormous 1996 cell phones), the tone (nearly as dark, but with broader comedy), the protagonist (Primo is nothing like Jim except in his methods). But both works are driven by the same sort of engine. The main character wants power. He is surrounded by rivals and people trying to stop him. But they all have weaknesses. And weaknesses can be exploited.

I tend to love stories about nefarious master manipulators playing with people as though they were pawns in a chess game. I'm not sure why, since I am not much of a schemer myself. Maybe it's because one of the first long-form stories I read when I was growing up was the three-year Obadiah Stane arc in Iron Man. I'd come to expect villains to be evil clowns and skull-faced Nazis, but then I bought my first issue of Iron Man and the bad guy, Stane, was... a guy in a suit. He had no powers. He also had no ethics. Hmm, my boss is infatuated with his young trophy wife? Some faked photos will make him crumble and in a month I'll be sitting at his desk. My business rival's a recovering alcoholic? Let's get him drinking again! Profit is another such modern-day Iago, only his schemes are wonderfully convoluted — and when he goes up against other puppetmasters, the who's-playing-whom is just a joy to watch unfold.

I'm a little disappointed that I wasn't able to implement all of Profit's repertoire in Varicella. Murder, yes; paying people off, yes; taping incriminating evidence, yes; getting the right people in the same room, yes; but there wasn't any real manipulation. No getting people to fall in love with you, no talking your way out of getting shot by making your assailant a better offer, no turning down a promotion because, gosh darnit, I just want what's best for the company. At least I was able to work some of this stuff into the much more benign character of Alex Savaric in A Winner Is You, and then of course there's— ah, but that would be telling.

One more thing. One element of Profit that hooked me in '96 was its setting. The sleek corporate offices were matched by the exteriors with their clean streets, attractive modern buildings and spectacular scenery — not New York, not L.A., not Chicago, not San Francisco, just some nameless city of a planet prettied up for television. I assumed it was a composite with heavy CGI. A decade later, I know that it's not. It's Vancouver. So all I can say is that if I ever became Gracen & Gracen's President of Acquisitions, my first acquisition would be a triple cup from La Casa Gelato on Venables Street.

Return to the Calendar page!