The Pretender Season 4

After eluding agents from the nefarious Centre for a good three years, Jarod (Michael T. Weiss) finds himself back at the shady research facility (that kidnapped him during his youth) in the opening episode of the fourth and final season of The Pretender. Held against his will, Jarod is caged and routinely tortured by Miss Parker's (Andrea Parker) calmly evil brother, Lyle (Jamie Denton, who would go on to bill himself as James Denton on Desperate Housewives).

But, as the opening to each episode points out, Jarod is a pretender--a genius who can become whoever he wants to be. He can pass himself off as an FBI agent, surgeon, or drug addict. But what he wants more than anything else is to be free from the Centre and search for his family. By the end of the premier episode, Jarod has escaped the Center (again) and is helping those in need. In this final season, which ran on NBC in 1999-2000, Jarod finds love with a woman who has cancer, Miss Parker and Broots (Jon Gries) have an affair (albeit in a Raymond Chandleresque dream sequence where Miss Parker says of their unlikely tryst: "Do you hear that Broots? Pigs are flying."), and Raines (Richard Marcus)--carrying a bible as he drags around his oxygen tank on a squeaky cart--claims to have turned over a new leaf. Of course, nothing is as it seems.

Indo-webster The Pretender Season 4

The Pretender Season 2

The Pretender is an American television series that aired on NBC from 1996 to 2000. The series starred Michael T. Weiss as Jarod, a genius and former child prodigy with "the ability to become anyone he wants to be," i.e., to flawlessly impersonate anyone in virtually any line of work. Patrick Bauchau and Andrea Parker co-starred as Sydney, Jarod's childhood teacher and mentor, and Miss Parker, a childhood friend and an operative for the mysterious organization (called "The Centre") that took Jarod from his parents as a child and forced him to unwittingly use his talents for their own interests.

Jarod begins traveling around the country, searching for clues to his true identity and posing as doctors, police officers, attorneys, and various other figures in order to help those in trouble. Following the show's cancellation on NBC, two television movies were aired on the TNT Network that picked up where the series finale left off. According to show creators Steven Long Mitchell and Craig Van Sickle, the character of Jarod was inspired by serial impostor Ferdinand Waldo Demara.

Indo-webster  The Pretender Season 2

The Pretender Season 1

Jarod (Michael T. Weiss) is a child prodigy who was abducted at a young age and raised in a think tank called The Centre, based in the fictional town of Blue Cove, Delaware. Jarod's mentor and father figure is Sydney, a psychologist working for The Centre who coached him through a number of complex simulations designed to challenge his intellect. When Jarod discovered that The Centre was using data gathered from his response to the simulations for nefarious purposes, he escaped. Since that time, Jarod has been on the run, dispensing emotional justice to criminals who cover up their crimes by putting the criminals through similar (but staged) situations, and The Centre is never far behind.

Miss Parker (Andrea Parker), Sydney (Patrick Bauchau) and Broots (Jon Gries) make up The Centre team tasked with recapturing Jarod.

Indo-webster  The Pretender Season 1