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...