“The Philanthropist,” debuting at 10 Wednesday night on NBC, should be more than it is.
Created by Emmy winner Tom Fontana (“Oz,” “Homicide”), the drama, the idea for which has been kicking around NBC for months, has a promising concept.
Teddy Rist (James Purefoy, who played Mark Antony in HBO’s “Rome”) is a billionaire businessman who has an epiphany while in Nigeria to negotiate an oil deal. In the midst of a hurricane, he rescues a young boy, who tells him the name of his village.
After his harrowing experience, Teddy returns to his normal life, but he has changed. It’s no longer enough to make charitable donations; he wants to facilitate changes in people’s lives.
Bewildering his partner, Philip Maidstone (Jesse L. Martin, “Law & Order”), and Philip’s wife, Olivia (Neve Campbell, “Party of Five”), Teddy jets back to Nigeria with a vague plan of delivering supplies to the young boy’s village, even though he has no idea where it is or how to get there.
Why is Teddy doing this? Because he’s a man adrift. A year after the death of his young son and his subsequent divorce from his wife, he feels a need to help others, even if it means risking his life.
Local bureaucrats reject his offer of help (his British accent surely doesn’t help), but he hooks up with a native doctor, who’s trying to rescue some cholera vaccine from corrupt officials for a clinic she has set up in a local village. It takes all the skills Teddy has learned as a hard-nosed businessman to accomplish this task.
The premiere, with its colorful African backdrop, is enjoyable. But the series, which has more producers than actors (never a good sign), begs the question: Aren’t there plenty of problems right here in the U.S. to throw money at?
The idea behind “The Philanthropist,” inspired by the real-life philanthropy of Bobby Sager, is noble. But it just ends up feeling a little too much like “Touched by a Billionaire.”