![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Image by Getty Images via Daylife
The first week, Teddy risks life and limb to rescue a small Nigerian boy from drowning. You know this is a particularly selfless act because the guy who is trying to get all the people from the hotel to safety, dismisses this kid as not worth worrying about -- No no, sir, that's just an orphan. We eat them when there are no finger sandwiches for tea. -- Then later, unable to forget this poor child who has lined up to be an hors d'oeuvre by being so careless as to lose both parents, Teddy goes looking for him and discovers that there is a cholera epidemic raging in Nigeria. Again he risks life and limb (he does that a lot) delivering a bag of cholera serum to a remote Nigerian village where -- wait for it -- he finds the boy again! Yes, his good deed is rewarded. So he gives the kid a toy, beds the comely Nigerian doctor and goes on back to his life as a billionaire playboy.
Week two: Teddy risks life and limb to get a man to the hospital to donate a kidney to his dying daughter. (The man's daughter, not Teddy's. Teddy has lost a child himself which makes him very sensitive to children in danger.) Week three: Teddy risks life and limb (Are you seeing the pattern here? Good, because his body-guard is on the verge of a nervous breakdown over this habit.) to rescue a lot of young women who have been kidnapped or otherwise coerced into prostitution by a Russian mafia guy. And there's some stuff about the French government, too, during which Teddy is given the Légion d'honneur, seemingly for telling a damn good story.
For Teddy Rist (BTW, please note the similarity of the name Rist to the word risk. Coincidence? I think not. Heavy-handed? Well, let's just say it meshes nicely with the rest of the series.) no problem is so insurmountable that throwing his money and himself at it won't fix it. But, y'know... in spite of the fact that Teddy has more money than God and knows all the right wines to drink, he's also sort of a big, lovable dork which I think is why he gets so much play from so many otherwise sensible women who normally don't have time for the idiot playboy type. And that's part of the appeal of this show. Another plus is the excellent cast which includes Neve Campbell and Jesse L. Martin as Rist's business partners, a married couple who support his committment to social justice and who are obviously crazy about each other, and Michael K. Williams as Rist's long-suffering body-guard. But I think the most winning thing about the show is that it makes doing good things for other people seem sexy and adventurous. It flies in the face of all those stereotypes of old ladies who rescue cats or society types who write big checks because they feel guilty and anyway they can write it all off their taxes.
So in spite of the fact that there are any number of criticisms I could level against this show, the bottom line is that I find it fun, and I like that it's showing its audience that helping others is a good thing. For that alone I'd cut it a lot of slack.
And then there's James Purefoy.
