Forgotten Television: Peter Benchley’s Amazon

In 1999, a plane flying over the Amazon Rain Forest experiences an electrical fire causing it to crash.  The plane splits in half and the tail section slides down a steep ravine wall while the front portion bursts into flames.  Pia Claire (Fabiana Udenio), a famed opera singer, is one of the passengers, and although she was in first class, had moved back to the tail section out of fear.  Dr. Alex Kennedy (C. Thomas Howell), also a first-class passenger, is asked to check on Pia who is not feeling well. When authorities arrive at the crash site, they are specifically concerned with finding the body of the celebrity Pia, and when they find no survivors, they believe she perished in first class.  But Pia and Alex did survive along with a handful of other passengers and one flight attendant, Karen (Carol Alt). The survivors soon learn that no one is coming to rescue them as they are all thought to be dead, and that they are not alone in the jungle.  Children from an indigenous tribe chase the survivors deeper in the jungle where another tribe exists, and the warring tribes make survival more of a challenge for the remaining passengers.  As the series progresses, the survivors must fight to survive the warring tribes, cannibals, insects and disease, while also trying to find a way out of the jungle and back to safety.

Peter Benchley’s Amazon was a syndicated drama created by Peter Benchley and produced in Canada by Alliance Atlantis Communications and WIC Entertainment, along with German company Beta Film GmbH. The series premiered on September 25, 1999 and ran for 22 episodes with the final episode airing on May 20, 2000. The show was cancelled at the end of its first season, which ended on a cliffhanger. A DVD collection was released in 2011 to capitalize on Lost considering the similarities in plot. Peter Benchley is most famous for writing the book Jaws, the basis for the Steven Spielberg directed movie which became the first “Summer Blockbuster”.

In true “Forgotten Television” fashion, I don’t remember this series at all, and don’t think I ever watched it.  I kind of remember advertisements for it, but having watched the pilot for this article, none of it brought back any memories.  Where many of the Forgotten Television articles have a sense of nostalgia surrounding them, this one does not.  The first episode entitled Fallen Angels was decent, it takes some time in the beginning, introducing the audience to the characters and their personalities and what we might expect from them moving forward.  The production value wasn’t bad for 1999, in fact, each episode cost $1.2 Million to produce. The basic story structure was good and for the most part the characters were interesting and empathetic. I think survival series can be difficult and can possibly become repetitive, but with the introduction of warring tribes and a few other characters that weren’t on the plane creating the drama, this series seemed a bit more interesting, and the first episode does suck you in and makes you want to watch more.  Overall a well-produced, written and acted series.