Profit, a new prime time show on Fox,
starts from a unique premise. Far from being the sympathetic hero,
Jim Profit, the main character whose voice narrates the show, is a
villain. Viewers naturally root against, rather than for, the show's
namesake. This is new, different, and daring, and it makes for
entertaining television. But in another way, Profit is anything but
new. As is so often the case on TV, the villain is a corporate
executive. Jim Profit, in fact, is a supervillain gone berserk. In
the show's premiere episode, which aired April 8, Profit is shown to
be a relentless climber at Gracen & Gracen (G&G), the company where
he is a vice president. He uses confidential information to
blackmail a decent secretary into sabotaging her equally decent
boss, whose job Profit covets. When the secretary later comes to
work for Profit, he says: "It's good to
see Gail understands the basic nature of business. We adapt or pay
the price."
He uses other ruthless means to weed out those in his way. He
frames a female vice president for the blackmail of the secretary,
getting her fired. He seduces the wife of another vice president,
and then masterminds a plan to make it look like she's sleeping with
G&G's CEO. When her husband beats up the CEO (who, by the way, does
pick a new mistress every year), he gets fired. And viewers find out
that Profit became a vice president in the first place by inducing a
heart attack in the vice president above him. How did profit become
so evil? Late in the premiere, viewers learn that as a child Profit
was forced by his father to live in a cardboard box and spent all
his time watching television through a hole cut out of the box.
Profit tracks down his father, kills him, and threatens to frame his
stepmother if she turns him in or tries to thwart his business
plans.
The appearance of the show has rekindled a long-running debate
about Hollywood's portrayal of business. The experts' conventional
wisdom: the greedy scoundrels are getting what they deserve. Graef
Crystal, a psychologist and compensation expert, told USA Today that
employees "can't take out [their] rage on the CEO -- that person is
too powerful. You probably can't even talk to the press for fear of
losing your job. But a show that makes you say 'yes, that's exactly
what it's like' will hold your attention."
Alan Merten, dean of Cornell University's Johnson Graduate School
of Management, also pinned the blame on the business world. He told
USA Today that corporate executives "should look at this trend and
realize that whatever their financial motives, their actions aren't
playing well in Peoria. The timing of some large layoffs and big
[executive] bonus packages has been terrible."
Perhaps. But Hollywood's business bashing isn't, as Merten
suggests, a new trend; it's an institution. The show Dallas was
popular long before the current wave of layoffs and in a 1992 Media
Research Center study of entertainment programming, businessmen were
43 percent of the criminals, far more than lawyers, politicians, or
any other profession. Even, in the past, when there have been
positive business characters, such as the business owners on
Designing Women, they haven't been positive
because of their business. By contrast, there were evil lawyers on
L.A. Law, but also lawyers who benefited
society because of the work they did.
A more likely explanation for Hollywood's continued business
bashing is that entertainment television writers still hold to an
ideology which cannot conceive of business as an honorable calling
that serves society by producing goods, services, wealth, and jobs.
Profit, to them, seems to be a four-letter word.
