• The Philanthropist, 10-11 p.m. Wednesday, WTVJ-NBC 6

There's a good reason why competently run television networks want to look at a pilot episode before they buy a series. Regrettably, you can see it for yourself Wednesday night if you watch NBC's ineffably stupid The Philanthropist. NBC's programming boss Ben Silverman reportedly purchased it sight unseen at dinner one night, and the only thing I can figure is the oysters had gone bad.

Pointless, charmless and bound to be viewerless after the first half-hour or so, The Philanthropist recalls such epochal television bombs as Manimal (a scientist who could turn into a crime-fighting dolphin) or It's About Time (astronauts break the time barrier and frolick happily with cavemen) in its conceptual imbecility: ''The heroic adventures of a billionaire playboy-turned-vigilante/philanthropist.'' Honest; that's right out of the NBC press release.

James Purefoy, the swaggering and relentlessly carnal Mark Antony in HBO's Rome a couple of years ago, here plays a resource-trading billionaire named Teddy Rist who, while trapped in a Nigerian hurricane, suffers some kind of guilty epiphany over his Gatesian fortune. He resolves to give it away, in the most ludicrously inefficient and counterproductive ways possible. A Nigerian village needs a box of cholera vaccine? Why ship it on the bus when you can bribe a narcotrafficker to deliver it for $250,000 and get a firefight with the DEA thrown in for free?

The DEA business is actually the least of Rist's problems; he's a magnet for misfortune. In the first episode alone, he's shot at by guerrillas, robbed by surly natives and bitten by a snake. My advice: If your village has been stricken by cholera and you hear Teddy Rist is coming with vaccine, run for the jungle.

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