Frankly, ‘Scarlett,’ I Had a Ball

“I have a tendency to overdo things,” Scarlett O’Hara reflects after forking over the coins to finance a band of Irish revolutionaries in CBS’ four-part sequel to “Gone With the Wind.”

That and resourcefulness are about the only traits linking the heroic, generous, business-shrewd new Scarlett (Joanne Whalley-Kilmer) to her petty, frivolous, self-obsessed, fiddle-dee-deeing twit of a predecessor, memorably played by Vivien Leigh in the famed 1939 movie that earned Oscars galore and a reputation as arguably the big screen’s best historical soap opera.

In fact, the only way to enjoy “Scarlett” for what it is--tremorously mounted fun and fluff based on a popular novel by Alexandra Ripley--is to mentally sever it from the original story and think of it as unrelated, lovable trash.

After nearly eight hours of illogically intersecting each other’s lives in the unlikeliest places, Scarlett and Rhett Butler (Timothy Dalton) ultimately settle into a monotonous humdrum more reminiscent of Ozzie and Harriet than the ill-suited tumultuous lovers created by novelist Margaret Mitchell.

Prior to that, though, the earth shakes beneath these characters.

When we last checked in on these kids in the waning moments of “Gone With the Wind,” Rhett frankly didn’t give a damn and Scarlett was dearly counting on tomorrow being another day. Is it ever.

In the aftermath depicted by the sequel, Scarlett and Rhett remain a bitterly estranged married couple, but she has acquired a halo and he a courtly Southern accent that he uses to charm local belles and soothe the dying Mammy (Esther Rolle). Tara, the graceful O’Hara estate, is now pretty much a fixer-upper. And after burying his beloved-but-boring Melanie, the grieving, liquored-up new Ashley Wilkes (Stephen Collins) is making a smashing comeback (with Scarlett’s cash) as an Atlanta real estate baron specializing in affordable, split-level antebellums.

Amid shocking displays of integrity, the new Scarlett continues to chase after her cynical husband, who continues to resist, mistakenly believing she’s still the infantile schemer who sank her claws into Clark Gable. “She’s heartless, she’s selfish,” Rhett says. “She’s like a child who cries for a toy and breaks it.”

His cigar-smoking friend, Sally (Jean Smart), suggests that Scarlett could change. “When pigs can fly,” Rhett retorts, sourly.

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Set during the Civil War and the ashen chaos that immediately followed it, “Gone With the Wind” had a sweeping, panoramic backdrop that resonated the fortissimo of symphonic melodrama. The sequel has no such backdrop. What it does have, though, is a world-class hellion with a golden heart in British Whalley-Kilmer’s formidable Scarlett, a plucky, sexy, man-conquering nymph who could torch Atlanta herself with a single laser beam of her blazing black eyes.

And with the war an asterisk in the mid-1870s, “Scarlett” creates its own thunder.

Much of Episode 1 is an Architectural Digest tour of Atlanta, Savannah and Charleston. But in a brief encounter near the end of the first two hours, Rhett and Scarlett have a stormy boating adventure that sweeps them toward Episode 2 on a sea of soapsuds, ultimately carrying him toward a divorce lawyer and a new wife (Annabeth Gish) and her all the way to Ireland.

It’s here, amid the history-encrusted, spectacularly filmed lushness of Ireland’s County Meath, that Scarlett and this William Hanley-written, John Erman-directed story reach their exquisitely overwrought potential. Television needs more just like it.

Taking to Ireland and her freshly acquired Ballyhara estate the way Leigh’s Scarlett did to Tara, Whalley-Kilmer’s Scarlett explores her O’Hara roots with a saucy vigor, shedding her decadence and spreading her philanthropy while moving with ease among the local potatoheads and such anti-British plotters as her cousin Colum (Colm Meaney).

Things really energize with the emergence of the twisted, demonic, monstrously vile Richard, Earl of Fenton (Sean Bean). Later, of course, come the murder, the rape, the second murder, the trial, the missing witness and the gallows that threaten to tragically put a noose on the off-again, on-again love epic of Rhett and Scarlett.

Sure. When pigs can fly.

* “Scarlett” airs Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday at 9 p.m. on CBS (Channels 2 and 8).