April 5, 1996

DARK VICTORIES

Fox brings new blood to its mid-season lineup with two wickedly fun dramas–the vampire epic ‘Kindred: The Embraced’ and the high-finance serial ‘Profit.

By Ken Tucker

Here we have two additional reasons to give up on Melrose Place. Why keep watching that increasingly sorry mess when you now have these new super-fab Fox soaps to add to your already decadent viewing schedule? PROFIT (Fox, Mondays, 9-10 p.m.) and KINDRED: THE EMBRACED (Fox, Wednesdays, 9-10 p.m.) could not be more different from each other. Lean and gratifyingly mean, Profit is about Jim Profit (Adrian Pasdar), a ruthless businessman snaking his way up the corporate ladder; the wonderfully complicated Kindred: The Embraced features five clans of vampires, snarling and sucking in contemporary San Francisco.

Mind you, I didn’t want to be drawn into either of these series. Big-business hugger-mugger bores me stiff. And as far as classy vampires go, let me put it this way: Anne Rice novels have always struck me as literature for people who don’t know who Angela Carter or Jonathan Carroll are. But Profit and Kindred are uncommonly sharp shows.

Just as the structure of Profit is as sleekly simple as its title, so Kindred: The Embraced is knottily mystifying. This much can be ascertained. San Francisco harbors a quintet of vampire tribes: The Ventrue (savvy aristos), The Brujah (thuggish mobsters), The Gangrels (model-handsome punks), The Nosferatu (the oldest and most traditionally vampire-like), and The Torreadors (arty types). Together, they form The Kindred, and for a human to have blood withdrawn by any of them is to be “embraced.”

Kindred is The Godfather soaked in blood. The vampires’ chief opponents are one another (war between the clans breaks out) and a human cop played by C. Thomas Howell (see box on page 66). As a protagonist, Howell is hopelessly lightweight; he’s the biggest name in the cast, yet you want someone to sink fangs into his neck ASAP. Far more appealing is the elegant, intelligent prince of the Ventrue, Julian Luna (Mark Frankel). This “boss of all bosses” tries to keep the peace among The Kindred even as he’s being drawn romantically to a human reporter (Kelly Rutherford) whom he knows he should not, um, embrace.

Both Kindred’s Frankel and Profit’s Pasdar are stage-trained actors who bring two distinctive brands of menace to the small screen. They’re playing heavies, but sympathetically. If Profit has the edge right now, it’s because its antihero is such an instant gas. But I wouldn’t be surprised if the dense allure of Kindred, notwithstanding Howell, proves equally habit-forming.

Grades: Profit: A Kindred: A-