With his shellacked hair and crocodile smile, he all but slithered onto
television screens when the Fox series "Profit" premiered April 8. Coolly
charming and delightfully diabolical, he was introduced as the rising hotshot
of the Gracen & Gracen conglomerate. A charter member of the
by-any-means-necessary school of success, Profit was the kind of corporate
cobra who could make Gordon Gekko seem as harmless as a garden snake.
As brilliantly played by Adrian Pasdar, he wasn't an antihero, but an antichrist
rustling the shadows and skeletons in everyone else's closet. Of course,
he had his own dark secrets - he murdered his father and had an affair with
his drug-addled, conniving stepmother. And then there was the matter of his
tortured childhood and the cardboard moving box where Profit still slept
naked and curled in a fetal position.
"Profit" was hailed as one of the best shows of the season. Critics scrambled
for superlatives to praise the program, predicting wonderfully wicked doings
for one of the most daringly original TV characters in recent years.
But four episodes into its run, "Profit" proved a loss. With dismal ratings,
the series was yanked off the air. In these highly competitive times, with
so much at stake, even kudos from the critics was not a lifesaver for a program
drowning in the depths of the Nielsens.
The final four episodes will air during the summer, but the show's cancellation
was one of the biggest blows in a TV season full of dead spots. Especially
disheartening was how quickly Fox dropped the ax on the promising series,
which may have been too smart, too sinister and, ultimately, too tough to
categorize for television's taste. Even a clunker like "My Mother the Car"
got an entire season before mercifully sputtering to a halt.
"'Profit,' I think, is one of the most obvious abuses of quick cancellation
I've seen in a long time," said Robert Thompson, associate professor of
television at Syracuse University's S.I. Newhouse School of Public
Communications.
"It seemed like Fox really flew in the face of anybody who was writing or
talking about that show," he said. "The very weeks when it was getting these
incredible reviews they decided to take it off the schedule."
"Profit," which also starred Lisa Blount, Lisa Zane and Keith Szarabajka,
aired Mondays at 9. It staggered from the start, lost among CBS' "Murphy
Brown" and "Cybill" and NBC's inexplicably popular women-in-peril TV movies.
Then the show ran into the first part of the finale of ABC's "Murder One."
And while that critically acclaimed show flailed in the ratings all year,
it received big numbers for the conclusion of the show's season-long murder
trial.
But the final, fatal blow for "Profit" came April 29, when the series got
a measly 3.9 rating compared with the 19.5 scored by Part 2 of the blockbuster
NBC miniseries "The Beast." In the final season numbers, "Profit" ranked
138th out of 159 shows.
Given the much-hyped competition, some say the final ratings of "Profit"
were not an accurate assessment of the series' potential. But Fox executives
maintain the program was given a fair chance to find an audience.
"Obviously it was in a sweeps period, and the ratings just weren't there,"
a Fox executive said. Sources say Fox Entertainment president John Matoian
called the cancellation the greatest disappointment of his career.
Even John McNamara, who created and executive-produced the series with Stephen
Cannell and David Greenblatt, was reluctant to "play the blame game." He
told an interviewer, "Fox promoted us and spent money like you wouldn't believe."
Yet he could not hide his chagrin over the show's quick cancellation.
"You know we were ecstatic as those rave reviews were rolling in," he said.
"Then after we got slaughtered by 'Murder One,' Fox said they were going
to pull Episode 6. Then after 'The Beast' debacle, it was 'We're going to
pull Episode 5 and hold it to June.'
"OK, I understand the business of it all," McNamara said. "But we would have
found an audience."
"Profit" had already found an audience among the members of Viewers for Quality
Television, the Virginia-based organization headed by Dorothy Swanson. She
has been inundated with calls and letters from viewers discouraged by the
show's demise.
"It certainly was not a mainstream show. It wasn't for everyone. There were
parts of it I'm sure mainstream viewers found very disturbing and unappealing,"
she said. "But for people who like interesting television, it was very well
written. It was spellbinding. You had to know what made this guy tick.
"It was one of the more interesting and innovative, if not the most interesting
and innovative, series of this new season, which had basically had nothing,"
Swanson said. "The show was too good."
If "Profit" had received a reprieve, if the show had been granted the opportunity
to find an audience, it could have joined an illustrious list of television
shows that floundered before soaring into the rarefied air of classics. Comedies
such as "All in the Family" and "Seinfeld" and dramas such as "Hill Street
Blues" and "St. Elsewhere" all came dangerously close to cancellation during
their first season.
"The best series television will almost invariably require a time to catch
on. 'The Beverly Hillbillies' didn't take long to catch on because the premise
was so obvious," Thompson said. "But with really complex programming like
'Hill Street Blues,' 'M*A*S*H' [and] 'Profit,' it isn't immediately apparent
what's going on, and it takes a while for the whole thing to gel.
"I know very few people that would bear with a Dickens story for more than
the first three chapters if they were looking to be hyper-stimulated right
off the bat," he said. "It takes those long novels a good 100 pages to begin
to come together, and that's how I view some of the better television programs."
Instead, "Profit" joins the ranks of TV's noble failures, programs that caught
the eyes of the critics but never the wide interest of viewers. "Nichols,"
an arch, unconventional Western starring James Garner, garnered little support,
lasting one season, 1971-72. "Max Headroom" portrayed a twisted future dominated
by TV; ratings were constantly monitored, and any program showing the slightest
dip was instantly canceled. The show was not only innovative but prescient;
it lasted less than a season in 1987. And last year, "My So-Called Life,"
the acclaimed adolescent angst-fest, folded after one season despite critical
raves and a concerted effort by loyal viewers to save the show.
Television viewers have endured quick cancellation periods in the past -
the late 1970s, when ABC and Fred Silverman ruled the tube, come to mind
- although some doubt the medium has hit such a slide again. They point to
recent renewals of such programs as ABC's "Murder One" and NBC's "Homicide:
Life on the Street" as evidence that quality, not ratings, is sometimes enough
to sustain a program from season to season.
Except, it would seem, in the case of "Profit." Some Internet buffs have
even suggested Fox president Rupert Murdoch canned the show because its scathing
portrait of the corporate world may have too closely resembled his own empire.
"Normally networks bleed for reviews like those 'Profit' got, but here it
made no difference," said Michele Leponde, who is writing a book about television
in the 1990s. "It's almost as if the network had something special in their
hands and they just didn't know it. Maybe it's like a sign that Fox is starting
to behave like the older networks."
Once the upstart, Fox could always be counted on for irreverent programming
such as "Married ... with Children," "The Simpsons," "In Living Color" and
"New York Undercover." "Profit," which was too dark to be called comedy but
too gleefully wicked to be a straight drama, seemed the quintessential program
for the maturing network.
As the new kid on the block, Fox was more likely to give new programs an
opportunity to find an audience. Such patience helped make hits of "Melrose
Place" and "The X-Files." Even a show like "Party of Five," which has had
more success with critics than viewers, has remained on the schedule.
Last-place networks, Syracuse's Thompson said, "have always had a tendency
to be much more patient with shows because they have nothing to lose." He
contends "Hill Street Blues," which premiered in January 1981 with lousy
ratings, would have been canceled by a first-place network. Indeed, at the
time, NBC was in last place - and more willing and able to take chances with
programming. By the time "Hill Street" finished its run in 1987, it was one
of the most honored dramatic series in television history, paving the way
for such programs as "NYPD Blue" and "Homicide."
Yet as the network's fortunes changed in the mid-1980s with such mega-hits
as "The Cosby Show," NBC showed much less tolerance with failing programs.
The same could now be said of Fox, which has become more of a player in the
network standings.
"Fox, by being the last-place network, used to have that luxury to hold on
to things. Now, of course, it isn't always necessarily last place; some of
its time slots are doing very well," Thompson said. "It's now competing in
a field where there are networks behind them - WB and UPN. I think Fox, being
in the middle of the pack, is perhaps now beginning to reassess what their
programming strategies are."
There is a notion that TV networks will always have a place for programs
that challenge viewers and defy categorization. Yet, the crash and burn of
"Profit," which could not live up to its name from Fox's standpoint, underlines
the kind of bottom line even Jim Profit himself would have understood - good
reviews are fine, but ratings and revenue are better.
"From an artistic standpoint, we're certainly not doing the medium any favors
by canceling things so quickly," Thompson said. "Unfortunately, unlike law
school and medical school, there's no such thing as programming school for
TV executives. The process is one step above witchcraft."
'Profit': why bad things happen to good shows
By Renee Graham, Globe Staff, 6/07/96
Perhaps the world simply wasn't ready for Jim Profit.
astralj@hotmail.com
Back to the Articles Archive
Back to the Main Profit Page