10 Amazing TV Shows You've Probably Never Heard Of
2. Profit (1996)
Yet another seminal Fox show that died a death before it found an audience, Profit is considered by many to be the most important TV show never to make it to a full season.
Debuting in 1996 to great fanfare and overwhelmingly positive reviews, Profit was cancelled after only four of the nine episodes produced had been aired, due to overwhelmingly negative viewing figures. It seemed that the American audience wasn’t yet ready for a network TV show about a Mephistophelean sociopathic yuppie killing and blackmailing his way to the top.
Raised by an abusive father in farming country, forced to live in a large cardboard box with a hole cut in the side so that he could watch television, the boy who would become Jim Profit escaped by tying his father to the bed and setting fire to the house. When he reappeared, he’s a changed man.
Masquerading as a highly-educated, well-groomed executive, the newly christened Profit began to insinuate himself into the corporate hierarchy of Gracen & Gracen, a large but unethical multinational conglomerate, by fair means or foul. As select people started to suspect Profits actions and motivations and dig a little deeper into his background, he moves beyond corporate skullduggery and the art of the con into outright criminal acts, violence and eventually murder.
All the things that turned the 1996 audience off Profit are the things that have made Dexter, The Shield, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, The Sopranos and Sons Of Anarchy massive worldwide hits. Dexter, in particular, was eerily similar in execution right down to the voiceover narrating Profit’s interior monologue. The show was just years ahead of its time.
The perennially underrated Adrian Pasdar plays Profit with a quiet, predatory grace: he’s brilliant as the sinister mystery man hellbent on taking revenge against an entire corporation for his horrendous childhood, and ruining anyone who gets in his way.
Why does he pick on Gracen & Gracen? That box he was raised in was a G&G shipping container… and despite living in a luxurious condo, that’s where our Jim still goes to sleep every night: lying on his side in the foetal position, naked, inside a dirty cardboard box filled with garbage.