August 28, 1994
TV WEEK
Character a mix of Bond, Indiana Jones New series ‘Fortune Hunter’ will be aimed at Fox’s NFL fans on Sundays.
STEVE HALL
He’s a suave, British, handsome superspy, able to disarm a beautiful woman with a quip or a terrorist
with a well-placed karate chop.
James Bond? No, “Dial. Carlton Dial.”
Dial (Mark Frankel) is the title character of Fortune Hunter, a tongue-in-cheek, 007-ish adventure series on
WXIN (Channel 59) this fall. It premieres at 7 p.m. Sunday, Sept.4.
Fox broadcasting officials hope the show, with its scenes of Dial swapping gunfire with bad guys and
seducing sexy females, will appeal to the testosterone of the fans who just watched NFL football on Fox.
Good luck. Dial’s most formidable adversary will not be some genius supervillain but a greying, wrinkled,
76-year-old newsman named Mike Wallace. CBS’ top-rated 60 Minutes has owned this time slot for years and regularly rolls over any competition like a tank.
“MacGyver was very successful in tandem with Monday Night Football for ABC,” said Carlton Cuse (The
Adventures of Brisco County Jr.) who co-produces the show with Frank Lupo (Walker, Texas Ranger). “I hope
Fortune Hunter can be the successor to that show.”
Remember Charade
His name is inspired by a Cary Grant character-Carson Dial in 1963’s comedy/mystery Charade-Dial is a former
MI6 operative rendered redundant by the collapse of the Cold War. To support his expensive lifestyle (such as collecting antique airplanes), he recovers items lost or missing in international intrigue for a high-tech company, Intercept.
How high-tech? Dial wears a contact lens with a tiny camera in them; hidden in his ear is a tiny communications system. Both allow a wise-cracking sidekick, Harry Flack (John Robert Hoffman), to follow and advise Dial in action from his couch potato lair at Intercept headquarters.
In the pilot, Dial takes on a superweapon, a curvy Russian spy, and numerous bad guys-who receive more of
a pounding than radial tires. But whether he’s blowing things up or bedding another swell dame, he always does it with irreverent humor.
Explaining to one cigarette-holding woman why he finds female smokers sexy, for instance, Dial says, “It’s the sense of mystery. You never know when their lungs will collapse and they’ll keel over dead.”
Frankel, a London native best known to American audiences for playing rich industrialist Simon Bolt on NBC’s Sisters, admitted the Bond films influenced his depiction of Dial.
“But I want to try for a greater level of unpredictability, so you never know what Dial might say or do next.” He said during an interview. “And I want him to have a sense of humor, even in the most dangerous situations. I’d say he’s more along the lines of Indiana Jones-you know, high-energy, sweaty and dangerous-than the supersmooth, cool, calm Bond.”
Good at Comedy
He’s obviously gifted at comedy: He stars in Leon the Pig Farmer, a Monty Python-ish big screen comedy that won the Critics Award at the Edinburgh Film Festival. Frankel plays a real estate agent from North London who discovers he was the product of artificial insemination: his real father is a Yorkshire pig farmer.
“I have a fair amount of Carlton Dial in me, but I’m probably somewhere in the middle between these two
characters.” Frankel said.
Co-star Hoffman may not look familiar, but younger viewers will know his voice. He’s the actor beneath the blond wig, top hat and purple suit of the Mad Hatter on Disney’s acclaimed educational series Adventures in Wonderland. Showtime subscribers also saw him playing Tonya Harding’s clueless husband, Jeff Giloolly, in a Julie Brown parody last week.
But Fortune Hunter’s Harry Flack may be the most challenging of the three. While Flack appears to be
watching Dial’s movements on a giant TV screen, Hoffman films the scenes staring at a blue screen. All the action is added later. “It’s a completely terrifying experience, because I’m reacting to nothing.” Hoffman said.
Fortune Hunter’s exotic locations are equally an illusion. The Tangier bazaar in the pilot, for instance, was filmed on a Disney studio back lot in Florida. The show will try to draw an international feel from Orlando locations at MGM, Universal, EPCOT and Disney World.
Perhaps Dial could apply some of those miniature explosives to the soundtrack at It’s a Small World?
