This boyish, athletic, engaging young TV actor experienced the showbiz equivalent of the Cinderella story when he was plucked from the relative obscurity of TV commercials and made-for-cable movies to travel around the world playing one of the cinema's most famous characters. Cast as the 16-year-old Indiana Jones for George Lucas' lavish initial foray into episodic TV, "The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles", Flanery ran to follow in the fleeting footsteps of Harrison Ford and River Phoenix (the first actor to get a crack at playing the young Indy).
Flanery carefully studied Ford's performances as Jones in "Raiders of the Lost Ark" (1981) and its two sequels and manages to suggest a younger and more callow incarnation of the great action hero. He's particularly good at capturing that look of anxiety that Ford often wore throughout many of his exploits. Despite this devotion, more often than not, he came across as a more cultured yet more macho Michael J. Fox forced to endure one hair-raising (and disheveling) adventure after another as he gains his moral education. Still the benefits of working for George Lucas are many: the show has given Flanery the opportunity to work with directors like Nicholas Roeg, Mike Newell and Bille August and actors like Vanessa Redgrave, Max von Sydow and Christopher Lee.
Beautifully produced on a budget of $1,600,000 per episode, these rather didactic adventures were released theatrically overseas but failed to snare much of an audience stateside. After an erratic broadcast history, "The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles" departed network TV in the summer of 1993. It resurfaced periodically on cable on the Family Channel in a series of 2-hour movies (budgeted at $3 million each) beginning in the fall of 1994.
Flanery branched out into other made-for-cable telefilms playing a youthful King Arthur in "Guinevere" (Lifetime, 1994) and again donned period duds for the Western "Frank and Jesse" (HBO, 1995). He acted opposite such seasoned performers as Mary Steenburgen, Jeff Goldblum, and Lance Henrikson in his feature debut "Powder" (1995) as a teen genius raised in the isolation of a cellar. He was also seen as rock and roll wannabe involved with cultists in the laughable "Raging Angels" (1995).