First viewed : 15 August 1981
This Southern soap originally replaced Roots on a Saturday evening, the pilot episode being shown the week after Arthur Haley's epic finished.
Flamingo Road was based on a novel by Robert Wilder and 1949 film starring Joan Crawford , both of the same name. The action was brought forward to the present day and, as you'd expect, soon moved away from the source material.
A dancing girl and murder witness in hiding Lane Ballou ( the lovely but not very talented Cristina Raines ) declines to move on from a small Florida town when the carnival leaves town and catches the eye of deputy sheriff Fielding Carlisle ( Mark Harmon ). Unfortunately this makes an enemy of local sheriff Titus Semple ( Howard Duff ) who's arranged for him to marry spoiled bitch Constance ( Morgan Fairchild ) adopted daughter of his business associate Claude Weldon ( Kevin McCarthy ). At first he railroads her but she returns as a singer in the bordello house of Lutie May ( Stella Stevens ) protected by the interest of local playboy Sam Carter ( John Beck ). As usual in soapland everybody has a murky past.
I watched the pilot but wasn't engaged enough to stick with the series. The main problem was the lack of any likable characters you could root for. Raines' wooden acting made it impossible for you to really sympathise with her especially as the guy she was pining for was a shit. prepared to marry someone he didn't love to advance his career. As the show's JR figure Titus was just a venal, corrupt, childless fat guy with no redeeming qualities or charisma. Everyone else was either hypocritical, weak or indolent . It also betrayed its forties roots, neither Titus nor Lutie-Mae were believable characters for the eighties.
Though it started quite well in the US ratings the audience started to peel away. To pep up the second series, the producers introduced David Selby as Michael Tyronne, a businessman with a revenge agenda and voodoo powers but it didn't recover. There were plans to make a third series and relegate it to a daytime slot but they came to nothing so the show ended without closure in May 1982.
The Beeb didn't show the second series until the summer of 1983, when it was broadcast late on Tuesday and Wednesday nights if there wasn't much sport going on that week, and I actually got back into it. I liked the idea of Michael as this avenging angel destroying the lives of all the horrible regulars and enjoyed the supernatural element. In the final episode he was supposed to have been killed but the last scene revealed he was still alive and coming back for more. Or so he thought.
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