New phenomena series will be sandwiched between "The Pretender" and "Profiler"

HOLLYWOOD may be make-believe, but "The Pretender" apparently is for real.

Already favored with the cachet of a two-hour season finale at 8 tonight on Channel 5, the series got another fillip Monday when NBC announced a fall prime-time schedule that moves "The Pretender" into the leadoff position of its Saturday night package.

"The Pretender" and "Profiler," both projects of NBC Studios, are the survivors of last fall's Saturday night "Thrillogy" gambit. Next season, they will bookend another mysterious-phenomena series, "Sleepwalkers, " which replaces the failed "Dark Skies" in the trio.

In TV, as in baseball, two-out-of-three is a pennant-winning pace. Michael T. Weiss is just happy that "The Pretender" is one of the two that are setting that pace.

Weiss describes the finale as a bit of a cliffhanger in which Jarod Russell, the brainiac character he plays, gets close to finding his parents, from whom he was taken as a child. He also gets close to another "pretender" who, unlike Jarod, has used his unusual gift for evil.

Pretenders are people whose intelligence is so exceptional that they can master virtually any profession, any skill. As a child, Jarod was abducted and held captive at a sinister think tank called the Centre, which tapped his considerable intellect to further the aims of evildoers. Having managed to escape the Centre, Jarod now uses his ability as a sort of intellectual Robin Hood, assuming various identities so he can turn the tables on baddies who are beyond the reach of the law.

Denied a normal childhood at the Centre, Jarod is constantly discovering new pleasures - Pez candy, the Three Stooges, Slinkys - as he embraces life on the outside while trying to elude the Centre's henchpeople, the honcho of hench being a tall, vicious, sexy woman named Miss Parker (Andrea Parker.)

Weiss' own personal magnetism has generated fountains of ink in the trade press, and it no doubt is a component of the show's loyal following. Not that "The Pretender" is setting the Nielsen charts ablaze. It generally falls between 60th and 70th position each week - pulling in slightly fewer than 7 million households. (A show in the top five will draw twice as many.)

Soap opera fans will remember Weiss as the hunky Dr. Mike Horton from "Days of Our Lives." Unattached but "always involved," he is already looking forward to late July and the 14-hour days of next season's shooting schedule on "The Pretender."

Copyright © 1997, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
John Levesque; 1997, Seattle Post-Intelligencer
St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 05-17-1997, pp 39.