The phrase "ahead of its time" gets thrown around a lot, particularly when talking about overlooked pieces of pop culture.
More often than not, the label is unwarranted. The subject (be it a movie, album or TV show) wasn't ahead of the curve - it was either a good idea half-realized, or it wasn't that good in the first place.
The 1996 TV series "Profit," however, actually was ahead of its time. It just took 11 years for television, and culture, to catch up.
Now, television is littered with shows featuring complex, unsympathetic heroes doing terrible things.
From "The Shield" to "The Sopranos" to "Deadwood," dark television dealing with morally ambiguous characters is common. But when it debuted on FOX in 1996, no one knew what to make of "Profit."
The show centered around Jim Profit ("Heroes'" Adrian Pasdar), a young, bright executive at conglomerate Gracen & Gracen.
He's charming, handsome and just happens to be a bloodless sociopath willing to ruin lives - and even kill - to climb the corporate ladder just a little bit higher.
He lives in a posh apartment - steel furniture, glass tables, a little Zen garden under the coffee table.
But, he also sleeps naked in a box in a secret room behind the bookcase.
And you discover all this in the pilot, just before the audience sees Profit passionately kiss a hot, sleazy southern woman named Bobbi Stakowski (Lisa Blount) before Profit pulls away and greets her:
"Hi, Mom."
It only gets better from there as Profit uses blackmail, greed and sex to get what he wants, and destroy those around him. In order to get the audience to warm up to a sociopath, the show does something that is at once brilliant and unconventional.
Throughout the show, Profit (through voice-over or directly into the camera) talks to the viewer, offering insights into his character, or occasionally hinting at what he plans to do.
This has the unsettling effect of making the viewer feel closer to Profit, as though the character is taking us into his confidence.
But it also implicates the viewer in his actions, leaving them only to look on as he destroys the people he seeks to replace, or views as a threat, like the tenacious Joanne Meltzer (Lisa Zane), Gracen & Gracen's chief of security.
Meltzer, along with new hire Jeffery Sykes (Sherman Augustus) are the only people who are even suspicious of Profit's too-perfect "urban professional" act, and watching them try to stop Profit becomes a fascinating game of cat-and-mouse.
But, Profit is not alone. He manages to dig up some dirt on an otherwise perfectly innocent, kind secretary named Gail (Lisa Darr), and uses his leverage against her to make her do his dirty work.
Gail serves as the viewer's conscience, bringing home the fact that even though we're rooting for him, Profit is evil.
But beyond dark subject matter, "Profit" also has a sinister sense of humor and uses its motivated office drone protagonist to serve as a razor-sharp critique of cold, soulless corporate greed.
Profit's a psycho, but all his coworkers just think he has a keen business sense.
Plus, his phony exterior skewers the kind of yuppie culture that choked the country for the '80s and the better part of the '90s.
Sadly, though maybe not unexpectedly, the show lasted only for eight episodes, including the 90-minute pilot episode.
But for anyone interested in a pitch-black, challenging character study with bits of social commentary and gallows humor, "Profit" is well worth your time and money.
From the Vault takes a second look at pop culture artifacts that might have been ignored the first time around, or that we might have simply forgotten about.