September 2, 1994<\/p>\n
TEMPO<\/b><\/p>\n
TV previews<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n
CUT-RATE BOND FOX’S ‘FORTUNE HUNTER’ FAILS TO MEASURE UP TO ITS MOVIE MODEL<\/b>
\nKen Parish Perkins, Tribune Television Critic.<\/i><\/p>\n
“Fortune Hunter” 6 p.m. Sunday, Fox<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n
As someone who has spent many hours happily vegetating in front of the tube with a James Bond film in the VCR and another on deck, I often wondered: why can’t anyone come up with something like this as a weekly television series?<\/p>\n
So you can imagine my enthusiasm as details emerged about a James Bond-type series in development. Then I learned the developer was none other than Fox Broadcasting Co., the perpetual puberty network.<\/p>\n
“Fortune Hunter” (6 p.m. Sunday, Fox-Ch. 32) arrives as the lead blocker in a lineup shrewdly designed to twist a knife into the underbelly of football-less CBS.<\/p>\n
The upstart network fully expects to keep football fans hooked on Sunday nights, offering along with “Fortune Hunter” two signature hit comedies, “The Simpsons” and “Married. with Children,” and a pair of new sitcoms, “Hardball” and “Wild Oats,” which I’ll get to later.<\/p>\n
First this. Oozing with lofty levels of testosterone, “Fortune Hunter” stars Mark Frankel as the suave, self-assured Carlton Dial, a superduper agent-for-hire. Dial free-lances for Intercept, a high-tech global recovery organization that pays him handsomely to find rare and potentially dangerous items-the same kinds of stuff Indiana Jones hunts down for museums.<\/p>\n
Dial may not be a paragon of integrity, but he has a passion for what he does: making money and seducing women.<\/p>\n
Dial makes it clear that he is a material boy who likes his wines fine, his clothes stylish and his collection of airplanes in a straight line.<\/p>\n
He’s also a solo performer. Upon meeting his new partner, he whines, “Why do I need some chairbound geek in a peanut gallery watching my every move and issuing bad advice?”<\/p>\n
The geek is Harry Flack (John Robert Hoffman), who hibernates inside a state-of-the-art computer studio monitoring Dial’s movements on a large video screen. He alerts Dial to potential trouble and serves as the agent’s piped-in information source.<\/p>\n
If the pilot is any indication, “Fortune Hunter” is at best a weak-kneed cousin of the Bond franchise. Diehard Bond fans will find it all a joke; others won’t mind that the espionage adventures are kids’ stuff and the international locales cut-rate.<\/p>\n
Frankel, a British film actor known to American audiences for his recurring character (Simon) on “Sisters,” conveys his urbanity in the venerable tradition of all spy thrillers: He’s a chronic flirt who meets the most gorgeous women in the most bizarre places, a breezy wisecracker who introduces himself as “Dial. Carlton Dial.”<\/p>\n
It should be noted that “Fortune Hunter” is somewhat violence-sensitive. As an Intercept employee tells Dial in an apparent inside dig on the issue of TV violence, “We’ve been warned to cut down on the violence.” Thus, Dial’s gun fires tranquilizer pellets, not bullets.<\/p>\n
Still, the fundamental problem with “Fortune Hunter” is that once you take away the gorgeous face, the gadgets, the beautiful women and the daredevil antics, what you have is a materialistic, macho jerk.<\/p>\n
But, boy, he certainly looks good.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
[…]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":92,"menu_order":11,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-222","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/markfrankelfansite.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/222","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/markfrankelfansite.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/markfrankelfansite.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markfrankelfansite.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markfrankelfansite.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=222"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/markfrankelfansite.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/222\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2073,"href":"https:\/\/markfrankelfansite.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/222\/revisions\/2073"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markfrankelfansite.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/92"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/markfrankelfansite.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=222"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}