Welcome to the weekly TV thread and the new year. There’s no prompt today.
Last January was Cannell-ary at the Couch Avocados column. Every Original TV Score Selection of the Week that month was a Mike Post instrumental from a Stephen J. Cannell production, and I used the Post instrumental as a jumping-off point, just like I do with any other theme from a show, to talk about my memories of the Cannell show the theme is from and why I miss the late Cannell’s brand of low-budget—but often sharply written—escapist TV so damn much.
Cannell-ary is back for January 2026. I already covered—in chronological order—The Rockford Files, The A-Team, Hardcastle and McCormick (my personal favorite Cannell-ary piece I wrote was about that car-chase-obsessed show, a vehicle, no pun intended, for Brian Keith and Daniel Hugh Kelly), Stingray, and Wiseguy last year. This year, four Cannell shows I didn’t discuss last year will receive the spotlight and one Cannell show I did discuss before (in a bunch of paragraphs) will as well. Instead of chronological order, I’ll be going in the order of “show I watched the most” to “show I watched the least.”
A couple of Cannell shows I’m not familiar with will get the spotlight. But I do like the themes (by Post, of course, and his former composing partner, the late Pete Carpenter) from those two shows, and I remember them well from my childhood because when I was nine, I often put up a tape recorder to my family’s TV set speakers to record tons of opening title themes off the TV—those two Post/Carpenter themes for Cannell were part of my collection of TV theme mixtapes—so that I could hear them again and again any time I wanted to.
The first Original TV Score Selection of the Week for Cannell-ary 2026 is Post’s main title theme from a show Cannell had nothing to do with creatively, but it bore his classic animated vanity card at the end of each episode and was the final show that came from his indie studio: Profit, the dark-humored creation of future Angel co-creator/showrunner David Greenwalt and future The Magicians showrunner John McNamara.
Out of the five Cannell productions I’ll be covering for Cannell-ary this year, Profit, the saga of a sociopathic executive lying and cheating his way to the top of a conglomerate called Gracen & Gracen, is the show I spent the most time with—even though it lasted only four weeks in 1996 on Fox. In 2005, Anchor Bay released a Profit complete series box set that included four unaired episodes, and thanks to that box set (which I still have with me) and a couple of intriguing extras about the show’s controversies, I was fascinated by Profit that year.
It was the show where I learned that the best way to beat a lie detector test was to stick a tack in my shoe before the test like Jim Profit did in one episode. (Fourteen years later in White Collar’s John Larroquette episode, gentleman thief Neal Caffrey similarly beat a lie detector test, but he pushed a thumbtack into his finger while he was being questioned instead of sticking a tack in his shoe.) I also learned from Greenwalt and McNamara’s character that “When you want someone to love you, open your heart. When you want someone obsessed with you, close it.” Profit played better in 2005—a year when antihero dramas like The Sopranos and The Shield were the talk of the internet, as well as five years after Christian Bale’s memorable performance in director Mary Harron’s somewhat Profit-esque film version of American Psycho—than it did in 1996.
Profit—who addressed the audience just like the corrupt lead characters did in the ’90s Andrew Davies version of House of Cards and Beau Willimon’s 2010s Netflix adaptation of Davies’s show—was nicely played by Adrian Pasdar. The Near Dark star was later best known for his role on Heroes as Nathan Petrelli, a philandering congressman who had the power of flight, but Profit remains my favorite role of his.
Greenwalt was also so fond of Pasdar’s work as Profit that he wanted to bring back the character and add him to Angel’s rogues gallery at Wolfram & Hart to pit him against Angel Investigations. (But he and the other Angel producers weren’t able to pull Pasdar away from NBC and Pax TV’s Mysterious Ways, the family-friendly supernatural drama Pasdar starred in at the time, so Greenwalt’s dream of an Angel/Profit crossover failed to come true.) And McNamara clearly had so much fun writing Profit episodes that a lot of the character’s deviousness later seeped into McNamara and David Simkins’s creation of Mr. Chapel, the mysterious antihero the late Michael Madsen mischievously portrayed on Vengeance Unlimited, McNamara and Simkins’s short-lived gem for ABC, except Chapel was a good guy who used the dirtiest tricks—but never resorted to killing like Profit sometimes did—to help ordinary people.
Chapel took on wealthy or power-hungry bullies who ruined his clients’ lives. He would have probably hated Profit if their paths crossed, and the mischievous, under-his-breath taunts he would have aimed at Profit are why I would have rather seen a Vengeance Unlimited/Profit crossover than an Angel/Profit crossover.
I don’t know how Profit would play in 2026 because 2005 was the last time I watched it. I’m not sure if anyone wants to rewatch dramas about corporate assholes who get away with murder in every episode. Everyone who’s not a MAGAt hates billionaires these days. But Profit wasn’t a billionaire. He was a child abuse victim from the impoverished parts of Oklahoma who murdered—really late into the two-hour pilot—his abusive dad and pretended to be an Ivy League hotshot to bury his past and start anew. Long before AMC viewers were fascinated by Dick Whitman remaking himself as Don Draper, there was Jimmy Stakowski. As the sharply dressed and soft-spoken Profit, Jimmy navigated a dirty business by being dirtier than the powerful folks he blackmailed and manipulated.
“While Profit is clearly the worst offender in this universe, [the] pilot makes great effort to portray the rest of G&G’s top executives as poor representatives of the human race as well. They are shifty, job-obsessed blank spots in power suits. No personality. No control. And really, not much morality either,” wrote Cory Barker in a 2012 TV Surveillance blog post about why he found the Profit pilot to be compelling, as well as too difficult and off-putting to relate to. “Profit might be the manifestation of pure evil, but he’s also a purer reflection of what’s really inside the people he’s trying to take down on his way to the top. All these spineless executives are capable of the things that Profit does in this pilot – blackmail, adultery, extortion, bribery, etc. – but he’s smart enough and ambitious enough to actually pull the trigger.”
He’s also less ashamed of his sexual behavior. During the Profit pilot’s audio commentary, one of the Anchor Bay DVD release extras, McNamara amusingly recalled the day he and Greenwalt pitched the pilot’s script to a CBS executive. Things appeared to be going smoothly at the pitch meeting—until Greenwalt and McNamara described the end of Act 1: Profit shares a steamy kiss with an attractive and slightly older woman and then says to the woman, who ended up being played by the late Lisa Blount from John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness, “Hi, Mom.”
“That’s the main guy? Okay, you can stop the pitch. Get out of my office now,” said the disgusted exec to Greenwalt and McNamara.
According to McNamara, the CBS guy, whose name he refused to divulge during the commentary, went on to produce popular but terrible reality shows. McNamara described the exec’s work as a reality TV producer as “exactly the kind of job he so richly deserves.”
And there you have the reason why Profit was never a hit like Mad Men was: the “Hi, Mom” line. Even though Greenwalt and McNamara changed Bobbi Stakowski, Blount’s Southern belle character, from being Profit’s birth mom to being Profit’s stepmom, Fox was never comfortable with Profit.
“Many viewers, particularly in the Bible Belt, reportedly called their local affiliates to complain about the amoral lead character, calling him ‘Satan in a Suit,’ ” wrote Barker.
As Profit rose through the ranks of Gracen & Gracen, company security chief Joanne Meltzer (Lisa Zane, who, a year later, was a villainous highlight of Fox’s short-lived Roar, the 5th-century action drama that introduced Heath Ledger to America) and lawyer Jeffrey Sykes (Sherman Augustus, who later became one of my favorite regulars on the post-apocalyptic martial arts action drama Into the Badlands) both looked on with frustration and dug for dirt to discredit Profit. But Meltzer and Sykes’s attempts to take down Profit never got to reach a conclusion because after four weeks of failing to succeed in a 9pm time slot right after Melrose Place, the immensely popular Fox soap that was full of female Jim Profits, the network immediately sacked Profit.
The show was simply too weird. (But it’s worth tracking down on YouTube.) Greenwalt and McNamara based Profit’s fucked-up childhood on the real-life case of a serial killer who was raised in a cardboard box. Even as an adult, Profit continued to sleep inside the same Gracen & Gracen box his dad used to imprison him in—with a hole cut into the box by his dad so he could watch TV, which led to his hatred of TV—back when he was Jimmy Stakowski. Several episodes concluded with a naked Profit curling up into that box and staring straight at me as if he’s about to wipe out my entire life savings. Eeeeuugghh. It’s still an unsettling image after all these years.
The monster in a box from Creepshow doesn’t creep me out, but the monster in the Gracen & Gracen box does.