Profiler – Season One  (TV boxed set)

 

Picture: B-     Sound: C+     Extras: C     Episodes: B-

 

 

There are few phenomenal successes on TV because there are so many channels and the talent usually tries for feature films, unless they can write like crazy.  When that happens, we get TV classics like All In The Family, The Avengers, The Sopranos and Chris Carter’s The X Files.  NBC, the number one network at the time Carter’s series was a megahit for the Fox Network, wanted badly to have their answer to it and cash in.  Among the shows they tried out were Dark Skies and the more commercially successful subject of this review, Profiler.

 

Ally Walker is Dr. Samantha Waters, an FBI agent with the ability to psychically reconstruct a crime scene with clues left behind, if she can find them.  Robert Davi, best known previously as the brutal Sanchez in the hardcore James Bond film Licence To Kill (1989), is Bailey Malone, a bureau head who encourages her to come back to work after severely withdrawing when a serial killer executed her husband.

 

Although we have had strong, smart woman leads on TV in recent years, Waters is the first female character with superpowers in a lead role since back in the 1970s, when we had Wonder Woman, Isis and The Bionic Woman.  Of course, there have been many characters that have had psychic abilities, as Gary Collins showed in “The Sixth Sense” episodes of Rod Serling’s Night Gallery, but this is easily the better show.

 

The series was crated by L.A. Laws’ Cynthia Sanders, a show that began great, then went into decline in a soap opera fashion.  Part of that was unnecessary pressure from the NBC of that time, seeing that series like Dallas and Dynasty were the big hits, much to the ire of critics nationwide.  Profiler has the problem of having a potentially good set-up, but letting it be sabotaged by too much predictability and unoriginality.  The credits look far too much like David Fincher’s Seven (1995, as derivative as they might have been), and the show seems to be tailing other developments throughout its run.  That’s a shame, because the leads are good and it would not have hurt to add other characters so they were not in an X Files/Scully/Mulder position.  That was a problem.

 

Another is that Sanders and the writers do not seem to be as familiar as they should be with the genres they are attempting.  That includes Thrillers, Horror, Police Situational, Mystery/Detective, and the Psychic cycles.  That hurts it, making suspension of disbelief tougher.  It also did not break enough rules of series TV and succumbed to the TV grind too fast.  Finally, like Chris Carter’s Millennium, it began much darker, then lightened up too much and too fast.  It happens differently here, and was not as dark as that show was in the beginning, but Horror on TV has this problem, going back to the show that all these series were trying to emulate in one way or another:  Kolchak: The Night Stalker (1974-75).

 

The six DVDs in this first season box have all 21 shows on them, and allow you to witness how the show almost immediately went into the wrong direction.  When looking at the show again, I was painfully reminded of all the little things that threw off a potentially growing audience.  From the commentary on pilot episode “Insight”, you can tell the actors have no awareness of the material’s flaws, but that they were just jumping into the material and doing their best.  That is on DVD One, while DVD Six offers an installment tying into the series of the documentary show American Justice.  The lack of extras further proves my point, that there is only so much to say about the show.

 

The full-screen image is not bad, but not state of the art for DVD picture, as the transfers look slightly off in color and fidelity.  This is likely from being second-generation video transfer materials, and/or from the latest analog masters.  If this is component digital, someone did something odd when operating the telecine machine.  Also, too many TV shows are digitized totally these days, which is stupid and hurts the picture.  As compared to DVDs of The X Files, these sometimes fare well, as some of those transfers are recycles from analog transfers used for the now-defunct 12” LaserDisc format.  The Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo does not decode well at all in Pro Logic surround, which is odd for a newer show.  A&E/New Video seems to be using a higher bit rate for the Dolby, but it is better just to play this in regular stereo.

 

The DVDs come boxed in a slipcase, in ultra-slender space-saving cases that are starting to surface more often.  The show has its fans, so if you have not seen the show, you should at least take a look at Profiler and judge for yourself.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo