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    Nostalgia Central
    Home»Television»Drama
    Drama TV Shows - 1980s 3 Mins Read

    Flamingo Road

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    1 9 8 1 – 1 9 8 2 (USA)
    39 x 60 minute episodes

    Flamingo Road showed that you can’t make a successful soap out of any old bunch of sexy scandals.

    Based on a novel by Robert Wilder set in the American deep south (and a 1949 movie adaptation starring Joan Crawford), it ran for two seasons only in America (on NBC) and was bought by the BBC for screening in the UK in 1982 and 1983.

    Produced by the same company responsible for CBS’ Dallas, it was colourful, melodramatic and seemed at first like Dallas with politics, a brothel and mango groves, with a similar mix of corruption, sex, financial manipulation and political jockeying – albeit on a smaller scale.

    flamingoroad_stella

    British and American audiences both soon tired of going down its pink-feathered paths though and found none of the characters likeable or even strong enough to tolerate.

    Also their names – Lute-Mae, Eudora and Lane Ballou – just made us giggle.

    Morgan Fairchild as Constance Weldon was a spectacular bitch, it must be said. Probably the most beautiful aristocratic bitch in the soap firmament.

    Spoiled by her rich adoptive parents, her marriage to the politically ambitious Fielding Carlyle (who loved another, naturally) began the action.

    While Constance proceeded to rip the clothes off every man in the steamy little town (only Skipper, her young brother, escaped), Field dithered and dallied with Lane, a poor carnival queen with a heart of gold.

    Even though played by budding heartthrob Mark Harmon, Field Carlyle was so puny – especially in scenes with Howard Duff as scheming wheeler-dealer Sheriff Titus Semple who controlled the town.

    The first series ended with Constance falling off a staircase.

    By the second series, David Selby had joined as the evil tycoon Michael Tyrone, to have an affair with Lute-Mae, the brothel-owner, and so discovering that Constance was really her child.

    Then he bedded Constance, shattering her with the truth, and sending the now deranged Lute-Mae into a sanatorium, threatening Lane and her new husband and practising voodoo against Titus (like you do).

    In the last episode, he faked his own murder, hid in a monastery and had Titus blamed.

    Field had contemplated suicide at one point, but was so boring no-one can remember if he did it or not . . .

    David Selby and Morgan Fairchild lived to see better traumas in Falcon Crest; John Beck, who played Lane’s lover, went on to Dallas and Mark Harmon to St Elsewhere.

    Constance Weldon Carlyle
    Morgan Fairchild
    Fielding Carlyle 

    Mark Harmon
    Sheriff Titus Semple 

    Howard Duff
    Lute-Mae Sanders 

    Stella Stevens
    Claude Weldon 

    Kevin McCarthy
    Eudora Weldon 

    Barbara Rush
    Lane Ballou 

    Cristina Raines
    Sam Curtis 

    John Beck
    Skipper Weldon 

    Woody Brown
    Elmo Tyson 

    Peter Donat
    Michael Tyrone 

    David Selby
    Jasper 

    Glenn Robards
    Tony 

    Joel Bailey,
    Deputy Tyler 

    John Shearin
    Christie Kovacs 

    Denise Galik
    Alice Kovacs 

    Marcia Rodd
    Slade 

    Michael Baseleon
    Julio Sanchez 

    Fernando Allende
    Alicia Sanchez 

    Gina Gallego
    Sandy Tyrone, Swanson 

    Cynthia Sikes
    Aareth 

    John McCann

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