For Adrian Pasdar, evil turns a good 'Profit'
Remember the scene in Dr. Seuss' "How the Grinch Stole Christmas," when little
Cindy-Lou Who catches the dastardly, black-hearted Grinch making off with
the family Christmas tree?
Then you also remember that the evildoer manages to squirm out of trouble
by pretending to be Santa, and telling the trusting tyke that he's taking
the entire tree back to his workshop to replace a bulb. Of course she buys
it, while viewers moan in horror.
He's a mean one, that Mister Grinch. And, finally, he has some prime-time
competition.
Take the Grinch, deep-six the Santa cap and throw in an Armani suit, and
you have TV's latest master manipulator, Jim Profit of Fox' "Profit." The
drama, which airs Monday nights at 9 ET, stars Adrian Pasdar as an up-and-coming
executive who will use any tactic - burglary, blackmail, incest or suicide
- to get to the top.
And amazingly, nearly all the Whos in Whoville think Profit is basically
a caring, well-adjusted, harmless guy.
True, says Pasdar, Profit's a villain. But he's not a villain in the traditional
sense.
"Watching Profit," the actor says, "is like peering into a fishbowl and watching
a piranha at work."
And while Profit exudes evil on the screen, he isn't violent - at least within
camera range. "There's really no violence to speak of," says Pasdar. "The
show is more of a mental thriller, which I think audiences are kind of ready
for - they've been talked down to for so many years, and just handed the
base materials in terms of viewing pleasure. It's really been slim pickings,
and I think the time has arrived for an intelligent show that deals with
the mind and the webs that it is capable of spinning."
Pasdar, a 30-year-old New Yorker, has so far carved his eclectic career from
film - commercial and independent features - as well as public broadcasting
and cable.
Network television was not a credit he expected to add to his resume, he
says, because television's full of all-too-typical sugary sitcoms and predictable
dramas that "seem to fall a little bit short of the American viewer."
Take for instance, Pasdar says, the shows introduced this year by DreamWorks
SKG - the TV production company formed last year by entertainment mega-moguls
Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen.
"You'd think they could spit out shows better than 'Champs' and 'High Incident,'
with the pool of talent involved, unless they're just throwing money at people
to create shows, and they're not really behind them. I mean, the best thing
they can do is 'Champs,' a half-hour comedy about men being stupid? People
can just look around and see that."
Pasdar's character, incidentally, has his own strange ties to television:
As a child, Profit was kept in a cardboard box, into which his father threw
his daily meals. His only company was the television, which he watched through
a hole in the box. As an adult, the clearly disturbed Profit still sleeps
in a box, on the floor of his posh penthouse.
But, Pasdar warns, that little wrinkle in Profit's character isn't to be
taken as a subversive message that TV is bad. "We're just saying that he
was raised by a TV. ... We never make the association that he's bad because
he watched TV."
Now, the question is, will "Profit" be something viewers find intriguing?
Pasdar, for one, is anxious to find out.
"I'm not saying our show is any better than anything else anybody's put out
there," he says. "I personally find it much more interesting. But, I could
be in my own little box on that one - so to speak."
astralj@hotmail.com
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