Guilty pleasure: Sean Patrick Flanery

I realized this weekend that I just don't have the makings of a good crazed-fan fanatic; I have big celeb crushes on, for example, Jeremy Piven and Angelina Jolie, but I am very bad about actually going to see their movies or TV shows. More about Piven and Jolie another day, perhaps. This post is about a new celeb crush, Sean Patrick Flanery. I would venture to say that he is best known as the Young Indiana Jones in the TV series of the early 90's, though I've never seen even one episode of that show. He has remained an extremely busy actor since, mostly below the radar in B- and cable TV movies, though he was a regular for years on USA's series The Dead Zone.

I first encountered him earlier this year in Kaw, a fairly good Sci-Fi Channel reworking of Hitchcock's The Birds, with Flanery playing a laconic small-town sheriff whose townspeople look to him for help when huge flocks of ravens start attacking people. The effects are pretty good for cable TV, the plot moves along well and there's even a good explanation for the attacks, and it was fun to see Rod Taylor, hero of the original Birds, as the town doctor.

Over the Fourth of July weekend, I saw Flanery in a Showtime Masters of Horror episode, "The Damned Thing," based on an Ambrose Bierce story. Flanery plays a laconic small-town sheriff whose townspeople look to him for help when folks start going crazy and killing themselves and others in extremely violent ways. Despite being directed by Tobe Hooper (Texas Chainsaw Massacre) and written by Richard Christian Matheson, son of renowned fantasy writer Richard Matheson, this doesn't really work. The violence is ludicrously portrayed (except for the very effective scene in which a man smashes himself in the face with both sides of a hammer), the characters are flat, the "monster," when it appears at the end, is out-and-out laughable, and the explanation is, well, absent, despite a flashback build-up that leads us to believe we'll get one. Flanery, playing the exact same type as in Kaw, is good.


From the evidence of these two films, Flanery can play a sturdy and reliable, if somewhat worn-down, nice guy who we know has some depth of character. He's handsome without being pretty and masculine without being piggish. Currently in his early 40's, he is aging superbly; I'm not sure why he's gotten stuck in the TV-movie tier of actors. At the very least, he deserves a network show, perhaps as a laconic small-town sheriff who... well, you know. (He would have fit right in with the ensemble casts of shows like Invasion or Jericho.) So now my next step should be to obsessively hunt down all of his movies on cable, or at least to watch some of the Young Indiana Jones shows on DVD, but omigod, they are priced at over 100 bucks a season, and for that money, I'd better by God see outtakes of Flanery in his birthday suit, and I doubt those are present. So for the time being, I'll just settle for running across one of his movies by accident. Like I said, not a good fanatic.