TELEVISION REVIEW

A rich guy becomes a rogue do-gooder in this earnest but tonally inconsistent eight-part drama on NBC.

By ROBERT LLOYD, Television Critic

“The Philanthropist,” premiering tonight on NBC, is a gorgeous-looking bit of earnest junk whose pilot bears the estimable names of Tom Fontana and Barry Levinson ("Oz," "Homicide: Life on the Street") as executive producers. Fontana also wrote the script -- from a "concept developed by" Charlie Corwin and Jim Juvonen -- and reportedly worked on a few more before he and Levinson departed the show over a question of tone. (The network wanted it to be more fun; you can see their warring approaches on screen.) The series is being described as an "eight-part drama," which is a nice way of saying it won't be back to prey on your conscience in the fall, or ever.

The gist is this: Pained playboy billionaire Teddy Rist, played by James Purefoy ("Rome"), saves a young boy from drowning when a hurricane hits Nigeria, where Teddy has gone on business. (There is some resonance here with the Child He Couldn't Save, a dead son.) Back home, among business partners Jesse L. Martin and Neve Campbell, he has a kind of delayed epiphany, and returns to Africa, where he is both bewitched and appalled by the lives of the ordinary poor, to offer his help (and find that kid). When he finds his path blocked, he goes off-road -- carrying cholera vaccine by helicopter, motorcycle and snake-bitten foot -- to become what NBC press releases call a "vigilante philanthropist," in bold defiance of the overwhelmingly negative connotations of the word "vigilante."

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Obviously someone with a lot of money, a more or less direct line to the White House and a willingness to work with criminals can get things done other people cannot. But for all its good intentions the show suffers from an kind of spiritual neo-colonialism -- a condition it acknowledges but can't dispel: "This is about you playing the role of the charming rich businessman who travels the world getting his hands just dirty enough to go back home to tell his American friends how meaningful his life is compared to theirs," says a Nigerian doctor (who, like every other female character here, is also a hot babe). Yet even as the script takes pains to mock Teddy's pretensions and illusions, it can't escape the fact that the show is built on them. And whether it's throwing cash in front of an airport worker or promising the DEA agent about to arrest you that he can drive your jet, the unintended message of "The Philanthropist" is that money talks and (nearly) everyone can be bought -- a good thing, I suppose, when your hero's superpower is that he never runs out of cash or cool stuff to trade.

Moreover, the show has yet to wonder on whose backs Teddy's fortune might be made, or who's getting paid and who's paid off. There is mention of an oil deal and a nonspecific "factory in Benin," and the show's website indicates that his is "a company that makes money by acquiring natural resources throughout the world." None of that sounds particularly encouraging.

I'm not sure the candy mint the network wants to make of this isn't preferable to the breath mint Fontana and Levinson envisioned; in any case, it is most silly at its most serious. It might be better to go the full 007. As it is, and notwithstanding some spectacular location footage, there's scarcely a real moment in it from first shot to last.

robert.lloyd@latimes.com