TELEVISION: MISSION: PARANORMAL

At first glance the new crime dramas Profiler (Saturdays, 10 p.m. EDT, NBC) and Millennium (Fridays, 9 p.m. EDT, Fox) seem like the sort of unwholesome entertainment that would send Bob Dole into a frenzied new round of Hollywood bashing. The shows share the same premise: a central character brings down Hannibal Lecter-type psychopaths by using an uncanny gift to see inside the criminal mind, literally envisioning the evildoers’ motivations. In the process both series serve up images unusually brutal for prime-time TV: severed heads, bodies crackling in flames, victims buried alive, near naked women beaten and stabbed to death.

Yet beneath the bloody mayhem lies the same knotty issue that the Republican presidential candidate has himself been working hard to articulate: How do we keep home, hearth and the middle-class dream from eroding in a world ravaged by crime, drugs and sexual confusion? Profiler’s Samantha Waters (Ally Walker) and Millennium’s Frank Black (Lance Henriksen) are obsessed not with the individual madmen who each week slice and dice their way into the crime fighters’ paths but with keeping the world impenetrably safe for their small children.

Millennium, produced by The X-Files creator Chris Carter and one of the most eagerly awaited debuts of the fall season, suffers from delivering its point too aggressively. The show is constantly contrasting the bleak offices and dark labs in which Black works to hunt the deranged cult leaders and sexual serial killers who are his prey, with the image of his blindingly yellow Seattle home, framed always by a blue sky that is eerie in its brilliance. Says Carter: “For me the whole reason to do the show was that yellow house–a bright center in a dark universe.” Meet Frank Black, Everypatriarch, on a mission to keep ugliness from tainting his family.

And it is a mission he doesn’t take lightly. Henriksen, a craggy-faced, baggy-eyed actor, portrays Black as the kind of guy who wouldn’t crack a smile if Strom Thurmond showed up in his driveway doing the Macarena–levity is useless in this cruel, cruel world. Speaking always in an exhausted whisper, Black is so intense that a perfunctory how are you doing from his wife Catherine (Megan Gallagher) elicits the answer, “I’m just confused about something I thought I understood about evil.”

Yet as over the top as Millennium can get, the show does succeed at creating a marvelously unrelenting sense of unease. Black is a former FBI agent who now works for a quasi-governmental law-enforcement organization known as the Millennium group. He has amassed enemies over his long career, and every time the camera turns to one of his co-workers or a friendly new neighbor attempting a chat, there is the sense that his haven could crack like a Pottery Barn picture frame.

Profiler tries hard to create a similar aura of ceaseless tension, but it doesn’t pull it off. The show is too pat and tidy to make you check under the sofa during the commercial breaks. Sam Waters, a sort of Jenny McCarthy with a doctorate, is a forensic psychologist who went into hiding after one of her targets, a serial killer named Jack-of-all-trades, murdered her husband. For the past few years she has lived in the Georgia woods with her little girl Chloe (Caitlin Wachs) and an arty roommate, Angel Brown (Erica Gimpel), who says things like, “I wish I could find a man as interested in my sculpture as he was in my legs.” Bent on keeping her daughter out of harm’s way, Sam manages to steer clear of chalk outlines until a former colleague at the fbi persuades her to help track a killer who has been murdering Atlanta beauties and placing black tape over their sexual parts.

Now that Sam is–however reluctantly–back in business, Jack resurfaces. Each episode has the faceless stalker sending her creepy reminders of his interest. You are supposed to be scared for mother and daughter–like Millennium, Profiler switches between images of evil and serenity–but Sam flips her voluminous blond hair back and forth with such perky assurance that you know she will elude the nut by the time the credits roll.

Moreover, when Sam declares that all she really wants in life is a safe place for Chloe to play, the FBI hunkers her down in her very own empowerment zone: a secret apartment in a firehouse in Atlanta that the agency has thoughtfully decorated with an indoor playground, some tasteful French country-pine furniture, steel doors and an entry system that requires a fingerprint reading for admission. When Sam sees the apartment for the first time, a not very ominous Rickie Lee Jones song fills the room. You can make the world a safer place for your kids–all you need is a good CD collection and a crackerjack security system.