Unlike those family friendly light action shows that adorned our TV screens throughout the 80's Tropical Heat came out in the early 90's. However, It was a bit more adult in its delivery as set in the Florida Keys, most episodes featured BIG chested scantily clad blondes in TINY Bikini's in the background of most episodes so it was hardly suitable for prime time. My Introduction came in early 1994. I was 20 years old, and I'd just moved out of my parent's house and had my first flat and I was still revelling in my new found freedom by staying up all night drinking beer and smoking cigarettes (and maybe other things too). And I discovered Tropical Heat purely by accident skipping through channels at about 2am. I really enjoyed it and was hooked from then on. Now I know that the show is HUGE in Serbia, but I'm not sure how big it was in other countries. One thing I CAN tell you for sure, is that you can ask 1000 random people here in the UK if they've ever heard of this show and about 999 of them will give the answer NO!
The show focuses on Nick Slaughter, played by Rob Stewart, (The Dana Andrews of the 1990's), a disgraced Ex-DEA agent now exiled to the tropical island paradise known as Key Mariah. He's a private eye who through financial necessity has formed an uneasy partnership with Sylvie Gerrard (Carolyn Dunn). She handles the paperwork and the books and he does the gumshoeing. However, given that this series lasted for three seasons and never once left the Island, Key Mariah must have had a higher crime rate per capita than Detroit and Chicago combined.
The efficient Sylvie is constantly butting heads with Nick, who would rather spend his time drinking at the Tropical Heat bar, run and owned by his friend Ian (John David Bland), who mainly appears for comic vignettes at the start and end of each episode, although his character is fleshed out and gets in on the action from time to time. Midway though season two, Bland was dropped from the series, (apparently bitter about his reduced role) and was replaced for the remainder of the series by Huckleberry Finn himself Ian Tracey, who played new bar owner Spider.
The plots of each episode are for the most part light hearted and comedic and the action was seldom gratuitous or overly violent and that was part of its appeal, that despite the added sexuality, it still remained predominately inoffensive, (unless you're a feminist that is).
In the intervening three decades since I first saw this show, I have now been able to hunt down a copy of all the episodes and I still watch them regularly....usually in the winter when it's blowing a gale or pouring with rain or even worse, snowing. As when the weather's that bad, (which is often here), it's nice to escape into a far away world of sun, sand, sea and BABES...and tap my feet to that damn catchy theme tune.
This TV show never fails to cheer me up.
The show focuses on Nick Slaughter, played by Rob Stewart, (The Dana Andrews of the 1990's), a disgraced Ex-DEA agent now exiled to the tropical island paradise known as Key Mariah. He's a private eye who through financial necessity has formed an uneasy partnership with Sylvie Gerrard (Carolyn Dunn). She handles the paperwork and the books and he does the gumshoeing. However, given that this series lasted for three seasons and never once left the Island, Key Mariah must have had a higher crime rate per capita than Detroit and Chicago combined.
The efficient Sylvie is constantly butting heads with Nick, who would rather spend his time drinking at the Tropical Heat bar, run and owned by his friend Ian (John David Bland), who mainly appears for comic vignettes at the start and end of each episode, although his character is fleshed out and gets in on the action from time to time. Midway though season two, Bland was dropped from the series, (apparently bitter about his reduced role) and was replaced for the remainder of the series by Huckleberry Finn himself Ian Tracey, who played new bar owner Spider.
The plots of each episode are for the most part light hearted and comedic and the action was seldom gratuitous or overly violent and that was part of its appeal, that despite the added sexuality, it still remained predominately inoffensive, (unless you're a feminist that is).
In the intervening three decades since I first saw this show, I have now been able to hunt down a copy of all the episodes and I still watch them regularly....usually in the winter when it's blowing a gale or pouring with rain or even worse, snowing. As when the weather's that bad, (which is often here), it's nice to escape into a far away world of sun, sand, sea and BABES...and tap my feet to that damn catchy theme tune.
This TV show never fails to cheer me up.