'The Michael Vick Project': Too few redeeming qualities

If nothing else, since so many college students are majoring in PR now, they can gather round and study "The Michael Vick Project," BET's eight-part quasi-documentary that begins Tuesday night, in which the disgraced NFL quarterback gives lessons in the modern methods of contrition. What works about the show? What doesn't? What is the actual price of being sorry? Why, after watching the first episode, do we still have no sympathy for Michael Vick?

Vick, of course, pleaded guilty in 2007 to running a dogfighting operation at a secret compound in Surry County, Va., where he and his acquaintances routinely mistreated and even executed dogs. Suspended by the NFL (where he ranked among its highest-paid quarterbacks), Vick lost all of his lucrative endorsement deals, was ordered to pay back most of his 2004 contract bonus, filed for bankruptcy and spent a year and a half in prison. Freed in 2009, he found gainful reemployment with the Philadelphia Eagles and tentative absolution as a Humane Society spokesman.

Animal lovers everywhere will probably never forgive him. Viewers of this show probably won't, either.

But there are fascinating tangents in "The Michael Vick Project" that seem to go deliberately unexplored. And if you watch, do be aware of a caveat as big as the blingy studs in each of Vick's earlobes: The series is co-executive-produced by . . . Michael Vick, with nary an explanation in the press materials of Vick's editorial control or the ultimate destination of any profits from the show -- such as, perhaps, an animal-assistance charity? (Also consider that Vick's camp used to deny that a show was in the works, but clearly, from previews, the filming goes back to when he was in prison.)

Yet, far from a defensive vanity project, the show turns out to be more of a cautionary, don't-do-as-I-did story of athletic success and moral failure. It's also billed as a journey back: "My fall from grace was tragic, but it was all my fault," Vick intones in the intro, in a mea culpa that's all too familiar to ESPN fans. "I'm on a mission to get back everything I had -- not the money and the fame, but to restore my family's good name."

That might be true, but judging from how much the money and the fame come up in the first episode, it seems reclaiming those is still Priority 1. In speeding us toward a summary of Vick's football career and what he describes as an addiction to dogfighting, "The Michael Vick Project" blows by some of its most interesting points of entry, starting with a truncated retelling of his childhood in a Newport News, Va., housing project.

BET only provided the first episode for review, but so far, there's too much about redemption and closure and not enough about the lingering biggies: poverty, race, education and the social pressures involved when a black man comes up from nothing, finds astounding professional success and financial rewards, and must now support an extended family who will always come to him for help.

With ample interviews from his mother, brother and fiancee, it's disappointing that the first episode doesn't root around more deeply for the reasons why Vick was drawn to dogfighting in the first place. What did it give him that nothing (or no one) else could?

From a trailer of coming episodes, "The Michael Vick Project" apparently will enlist ministers and motivational speakers to try to help Vick rehab his character. But what the show needs most is the intrusive presence of a good shrink, an objective outsider who will ask tougher questions -- not only of Vick but of those around him.

I never thought I'd say this, but Dr. Drew, are you out there? Are you available?

The Michael Vick Project

(30 minutes) debuts Tuesday at 10 p.m.