Profit--Articles

The famous article from Salon magazine with the illustration that just screams, "Hey! There's a guy sleeping in that cardboard box and he's naked!!!" The second half of the article goes off on a tangent about the Wiseguy TV movie.

Available at http://www.salon1999.com/weekly/profit1.html

Even Mel Profitt at his craziest (extolling the virtues of Thomas Malthus while on a junk rush), though, didn't quite prepare us for Jim Profit (no relation), the anti-hero -- or is that anti-Christ?-- of Cannell's latest series "Profit" (9 p.m. Mondays), which is now halfway through a six-episode trial run on Fox.

Co-produced by Cannell and writers David Greenwalt ("Shannon's Deal") and John McNamara ("The Adventures of Brisco County Jr."), "Profit" is a dark, twisted and pleasurably wicked seriocomic soap about the rottenest businessman ever to walk the Earth. Handsome, earnest, eager Profit (Adrian Pasdar) shows up for work one day as Junior Vice President of Acquisitions at Gracen & Gracen, "the 15th largest corporation in the world," and proceeds to charm, lie, blackmail, intimidate and murder his way up through the ranks, while narrating his story in passages of motivational babble ("What you didn't win today, you'll win tomorrow," "The important thing to remember in business is that what may seem like a calamity may turn out to be an opportunity"). So far, Profit has pumped a superior with a lethal dose of a heart attack-causing drug, framed another for murder, gotten still another fired for sabotage, taken the soul of a meek secretary and the sanity of his boss' wife. And it's all been terrific fun.

Profit is the corporate wolf in puppy's clothing, a company man, all surface. But when he's by himself in his fetishistically neat apartment, he's as dead-eyed as an automaton. Little he does -- eating breakfast, watching his fish swim around in their tank -- seems to register, except when he's sitting up in the middle of the night nude at his computer, his usually slicked-down hair sticking up like Kramer's, hacking into Gracen & Gracen's secrets. Profit is a true shark, an information-eating machine.

"Profit" is the kind of show you watch to see how (or if) the bad guy will get the punishment he deserves. Where "Profit" raises the stakes, though, is in questioning whether anyone in this age of exalted victimhood can ever be judged unequivocally guilty for their sins. Profit is guilty -- we know that from the start. We're privy to his plotting. What's more, Gracen & Gracen's steely head of security, Joanne Meltzer (Lisa Zane), knows it too, even if she can't make the company's Profit-dazzled president believe it. She's got to figure out how to nail him for good.

But, wait, ladies and gentlemen of the jury -- let's consider Profit's horrific childhood. After his mother died, his uninterested Oklahoma rancher father simply left the infant Jimmy Stokowski alone everyday in a filth-strewn pen made out of an old cardboard packing box with a hole cut out of the side, so the kid could watch TV. Even now, as an outwardly successful adult, Profit still curls up at the end of each busy day naked in a big cardboard box, staring right into the camera before going nighty night. His enigmatic expression at once invites viewers to feel his pain and dares them to dismiss it. As Meltzer says, "I don't know whether to arrest him or commit him."

"Profit" sure feels like Cannell, Greenwalt and McNamara's answer to the anti-TV-violence crusaders, whose contention that TV is responsible for all of America's social ills would make sense only if a person were, well, raised in a box. TV alone doesn't make monsters; it's the mix of parental neglect and abuse, a constant diet of TV's approximation of life (the violence, as well as the idealized vision of family) and possibly bad genes that did Jim Profit in.

"Profit" might have turned out pretty strident and one-note if defending TV were all the producers had on their minds. "Profit" gains heft, though, from its nervy satiric vision of corporate capitalist culture, of the way TV, advertising and big business come together to reach into America's dreams and souls.

In the April 15 episode, the source of Profit's obsession with Gracen & Gracen was revealed; see, he wasn't raised in just any old box, it was a box imprinted with the phrase, "Gracen & Gracen -- The Family Company." Jim is just trying to get back home. And when he talks to us in his raspy confidential tone and meets our gaze from inside his box -- and inside The Box -- it's as persuasive a demonstration of TV's power to make flickering images feel like pals as any show's ever attempted. We're hooked, reeled in and loving it.

The richly subtextual hijinx of "Profit" may seem like a radical departure for Cannell, the auteur of such sunny boffo entertainment as "The Rockford Files" and such meat-and-potatoes crime warhorses as "Hunter." But fans of "Wiseguy" knew he had it in him. For the first season, at least, "Wiseguy" was the most delightfully warped drama on TV. The plot concerned Vinnie Terranova's exploits as an undercover agent for the super-secret Organized Crime Bureau. Given deep background as a Brooklyn wiseguy, Vinnie infiltrated the inner circles of mobsters and racketeers and then busted them. In the course of his assignments (told in multi-episode "arcs"), Vinnie would inevitably become Personally Involved with his prey. The bad guys would turn out to be not entirely bad; they were either mirror images of Vinnie (there but for the grace of God) or had some other sympathizing quality, so when Vinnie had to give them up, he felt like a Judas.

Yep, "Wiseguy" was heavy on the Italian Catholic guilt stuff, not to mention metaphoric father/son tensions. But the thing that really made "Wiseguy" a trip was its seemingly oblivious homoeroticism. The climax of the legendary Steelgrave Arc was a long, over-the-top brawl/bull session between Vinnie and Sonny that ended with them locking meaningful gazes while the Moody Blues' "Nights in White Satin" filled the soundtrack; shortly thereafter, Sonny stuck his finger in an electrical socket so Vinnie wouldn't have to turn him in. This was a candidate for "The Celluloid Closet" if ever there was one.

"Wiseguy" never quite equalled that first arc (although the Profitt Arc had its moments). The big problem with "Wiseguy" was its star, who besides being only as good as his guest villain helped him to be, was apparently a major pain behind the scenes. He sat out long stretches of the show with injuries both physical and contractual while other actors took over the lead. When last seen on the show in April, 1990, Wahl-as-Vinnie had suffered a breakdown and found peace in a Seattle skid row church.

But in the May 2 ABC TV movie "Wiseguy," Wahl comes out of quasi retirement (well, have you seen much of him over the past six years?) to assay the role of Vinnie again. Unfortunately, his comeback is less Michael Jordan than George Foreman. The movie, produced by Cannell and written by Joel Surnow (who saved his good stuff for his series "Nowhere Man"), has Vinnie called back up to the big leagues after "sittin' on wiretaps for two years." Let's see, two years of wiretaps equals how many donuts? To put it delicately, Wahl looks a lot more, er, robust than he used to. He's also even less animated. Yes, Vinnie is supposed to be carrying a chip on his shoulder at being shunted aside by the OCB after his crack-up, but Wahl is stunningly listless. His lack of enthusiasm throws a wet blanket over any spark of interest left in "Wiseguy."

Still, it's not all Wahl's fault. The movie is a note-for-note replay of ancient "Wiseguy" formula. Vinnie goes undercover (this time as a bodyguard to a San Diego thug-turned-computer guru); Vinnie gets Personally Involved (with the bad guy's wife and young son); Vinnie has to betray a trust. Ba-da-bing, ba-da-boom. Credits roll. The difference here is that everything happens in two hours where it once would have taken four weeks. But given Wahl's ennui and the unwise casting of charmless Ted Levine as the bad guy, it's just as well that we're in and out of this thing as quickly as possible.

The old gang is back -- Jonathan Banks as Frank McPike, Vince's cranky handler, Jim Byrnes as "Uncle Mike," Vinnie's contact to the outside world while undercover. The OCB has, however, gone unspectacularly high-tech. Vinnie used to contact Uncle Mike via pay phone; now, he uses a laptop and video conferencing, which makes for embarrassingly lame-o simulations of Vinnie and Uncle Mike's computerized images. It's about as high-tech as Maxwell Smart's Cone of Silence, and almost as funny. The plan is for "Wiseguy" to come back as the occasional TV movie, ratings permitting. Don't hold your breath. This is a prematurely geriatrified "Wiseguy," like those "Rockford" and "Cagney & Lacey" movies. For heaven's sake, the open-ended ending even has Vinnie gaining a lovable juvenile sidekick!

Where are the kinky undercurrents that made "Wiseguy" so special in its time? The movie looks badly dated. If you didn't know about Cannell and Surnow's other current gigs, you might look at "Wiseguy" and wonder, Jeez, where have these guys been living lately -- in a box?


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