Tv On The Edge: Dialing for Dollars
Last year's hit Broadway musical revival was How to Succeed in Business
Without Really Trying, and the breezy corporate comedy is still doing
boffo box office. It's a shame, though, that How To Succeed's lead,
Matthew Broderick, can't be the star of Fox's pitch-dark business satire,
"Profit" (9 p.m. Mondays).
Not that Adrian Pasdar is in any way ineffective as Machiavellian MBA Jim
Profit, junior vice president of acquisitions at Grayson & Grayson. It's
just that Pasdar, with his menacing whisper and hooded basilisk's stare,
seems so, well, evil in the role. You wonder if his job description read
"Diabolical, ambitious go-getter wanted for upper-management position of
mighty big conglomerate. Must be willing to lie, blackmail and murder his
way to the top. Depraved family background a plus. Good benefits package."
It's hard to imagine people thick enough to fall for Pasdar's oily insincerity
and then turn their backs on him. Broderick, or a wholesome actor like him,
could have played his pleasant exterior and all-American niceness against
Profit's fiendish machinations and given the series another layer of complexity.
Still, it's an enjoyable show that tries to match the sleazy glitz of "Melrose
Place" with the fiendish fun of the three "House of Cards" films from
"Masterpiece Theater." Like the serpentine prime minister in those films,
Profit narrates the show, making asides to the camera as if inviting the
audience to take pleasure in his villainy. And Profit's a smidgen more believable
than a soap opera bad guy: His abused childhood has turned him into a sociopathic
adult who sleeps in a cardboard box and works, nude, at his computer, as
his aquarium casts ominous shadows on his skin.
Each week the viewers watch their antihero connive his way up the corporate
ladder, matching wits with Lisa Zane's corporate security officer and other
adversaries, and startling plot twists abound. But the cast is uniformly
bland (except for Pasdar and Lisa Blount as Profit's white trash, drug-abusing
stepmonster), and "American Gothic" proved the difficulty in finding an audience
for a show with a murderous protagonist. "Profit" won't find it easy to succeed
without really trying.
astralj@hotmail.com
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