I just watched it. Love Zachary Knighton as Rick. Love the helicopter. Love the landscapes. Like the high production values. Jay Hernandez is charming. But I don't like how high strung this thing is. The characters are full-on superheros (four different shootouts in one episode!), and the story goes at breakneck speed, as if they want to spill 8-seasons worth of Magnum PI backstory before they get canceled at episode 12. After the first episode there is no mystery left in the show, except wondering how many Ferraris Robin Masters owns. The thing is, the old version of the trio were soldiers, but they were also losers. Magnum was a bum, forever trading in on a single good deed. Rick and TC, they were struggling. TC had time to help Magnum because he didn't have customers. Rick had connections because working with petty criminals kept him afloat. They were hanging onto the past, dealing with crooks hanging onto the past all in a new land where they could have remade themselves, but failed to try. There was melancholy there. Something about the human condition. Maybe it's the difference between how we saw veterans of Vietnam and now see veterans of Afghanistan. Maybe society has stratified much more, and we don't have those struggling stragglers attaching themselves to rich people as much. So ok, it's possible they couldn't (or shouldn't) recreate what made the old show great. Maybe it needed a modern feeling. But they ended making the same show that I've already seen a dozen times in the last decade and stopped watching after the premiere. One thing that really would have helped would be to keep Higgins a generation behind the trio. If you need to introduce a woman (and I'm not saying this show needed that), TC would be the obvious choice to switch.
My wife and I enjoyed this more than it deserved. There may have been alcohol involved. The ending was anticlimactic - they showed the "Magnum leaping from the car to the helicopter" in all of the season previews and we know that Magnum is going to survive (unlike the fourth guy who should have been wearing a red shirt since it was obvious he was going to die) but we enjoyed it up to that point. Not sure if future episodes will be as much fun. We enjoyed the nostalgia but it may not be sustainable.
Yes, and you can make him Australian if you want that foreign accent. Or he could have been SAS, but of an age where he would have been part of their various actions in the 1970's and 80's. That way you can keep the fantastic stories that you never know are real or hogwash.
So I've seen it. A few random thoughts. I thought it was better than a lot of the recent remakes, like "MacGyver". There are several issues with it though. Primarily the relentless tempo. The original had quiet moments which let the show breathe. Really the only such scene in the premiere was Thomas' little moment with the kid. I agree with Spejic that the decision to change the concept of the Higgins character probably doesn't help the show. At the same time, I do think Perdita Weeks does a good job with the concept they have created. I do fear we are going towards a "Moonlighting" scenario (the look she gave him during that scene with the kid). Perhaps the most personal and shallow hang-up I have is this: Jay Hernandez isn't bad as Thomas Magnum but a part of me still thinks that the character should be tall. The same way that Jack Reacher should be tall. There was something about Tom Selleck's size (6'4" as well as those seemingly almost oversized limbs) and the way he moved that I seem to find an integral part of the character. It was a physicality that worked in two ways: it gave him a languid, laidback quality in some scenes and a physically imposing quality in others. Both of which Selleck used to maximum effect.
It was pretty good, definitely enough for me to continue watching it. While I imagine that future episodes will also have a lot of action, the pilot episode was no doubt particularly action-packed due to being directed by Justin Lin of The Fast and the Furious fame. The crossover with Hawaii Five-0's medical examiner Dr. Noelani Cunha (along with the previous mention of 5-0 by the police detective) was pretty interesting, though not overly surprising considering that executive producer Peter Lenkov holds the same position with the current H50 series (as well as with the current MacGyver series), making more of such crossover Easter Eggs likely and perhaps even a full-on crossover episode or two between the series' - after all, both are set in Hawaii. If this show ends up following a similar path to the current Hawaii Five-0, then it'll continue to develop its own continuity from the original and stand on its own soon enough. Two other fun facts regarding similarities between this show and H50: 1) Much like how Lenkov slightly changed the title of his other show from the original's Hawaii Five-O (with a capital letter O) to his version's Hawaii Five-0 (with a number 0), he changed the title of the original Magnum, P.I. to this version's Magnum P.I. 2) The original Magnum, P.I. ran on CBS from 1980 to 1988, its beginning coinciding with the end of CBS's Hawaii Five-O which ran from 1968 to 1980. One of the reasons CBS green-lit Magnum, P.I. as quickly as it did was to take advantage of the CBS crew, sets and equipment already in Hawaii that were no longer being used on H5O (another reason was to activate Tom Selleck's contract and hang on to him for the series so that they wouldn't lose him to the Indiana Jones role in Raiders of the Lost Ark, which also started filming around that time). All in all, I can't wait for next week's episode. -G
I actually didn't know about the scheduling tie-in with "Hawaii Five-O" in terms of the original show being greenlit.
You might not recognize it. You remember the episode that ended with Tom Selleck Magnum asking the bad guy if he saw the sunrise before he shot him? The 2018 premier was that episode.
Sure, his buddy Mack was killed in a car bomb and that ex-KGB dude Ivan was the culprit. I was being a bit snarky earlier but I actually loved Magnum back in the day. But I understand your point.
Jay Hernandez is charming. They are definitely going the "Moonlighting" route with Thomas and Juliet, which is a mistake. Also, they are going absurdly big with their cases. A terrorist plot on Hawaii in episode two? In general I think the biggest difference with the original show is just the pacing. There are very little moments it's allowed to breathe. Even the date scene was still primarily about getting the pertinent information that would lead to the identity of the terrorist.
Yeah, it was strange, especially as the mystery up to there was a very Magnum one. Part of this is because too much time is spent giving us all of Magnum's past as soon as possible. They should especially drop everything related to Nuzo. If you couldn't make us care about him before killing him, it's too late to try now.
What is definitely missing for me are those scenes where Thomas was not doing much of anything out in his guest house until Higgins comes in to complain about something. Of course that might be courtesy of the fact that such TV is now deemed too slow?
.....and goes in to a 15 minute monologue on the Mau Mau Rebellion. Those types of quirks were what made the show (for me at least) charming.
I've been thinking about having a Bin Laden-level terrorist on the show. I believe the problem is that Higgins has the (somewhat fantastic) resources of an entire nation at her disposal, and the bad guys have to be big enough to be worthy of that level of power. The old show had a character that served the plot in a roughly similar way, but Icepick was a clear bad guy, so going to him to solve problems had moral cost, which made the stories more interesting. What the 2018 show has to do is have Higgins go too far one episode and lose her MI6 privileges except in the most dire single-episode-a-season cases, and then introduce the new Icepick.
Yet another fun episode (finally had the time to watch it last night off of the HD-DVR). As with last week's episode, this week's featured another crossover with Hawaii Five-0, this time with informant Kamekona Tupuola in his unfinished restaurant (the "two amateurs" Kamekona referred to are 5-0's Steve McGarrett and Danny Williams). Though it may seem otherwise in the last two episodes, I doubt that Higgins has unlimited access to MI6 resources since she's supposedly a former MI6 operative; it's just that she seems to knows someone still there who can occasionally help her. It's similar to how McGarrett (being a former Navy SEAL) was occasionally able to get help from someone he knew who was still in U.S. Naval Intelligence in the form of Lt. Catherine Rollins, his on again / off again girlfriend who was later honorably discharged and had very briefly joined 5-0 before moving on. It'll be interesting to see if there'll be another encounter with another 5-0 secondary character next week (any encounter with the main characters - namely, members of 5-0 itself - will likely happen in a full-blown crossover episode). -G
They changed the position of a spy satellite because she asked. That's no trivial request - satellites have limited fuel, and can only change orbits so many times before becoming essentially useless. No normal agent can do this - it has to go up through channels. If she has the keys to that, she has the keys to anything.
It's also interesting that in the flashback, after returning home from his stay in the POW camp, Magnum considered keeping a mustache ala Tom Selleck before deciding to go clean-shaven that day. -G
how popular was the original back in the day? It was HUGE wasn't it? btw I'm surprised no controversy over having a POC in the lead. Jay's come a long way from Hang Time and Hostel
Yes, and it's hard for younger people to understand how big. There was no internet, and cable TV was in its infancy. A quarter of all Americans with televisions were watching this show.
It was a kind of mix of serious and comic which was common in television at the time (like Simon & Simon, Remington Steel, and many more). There were certainly people's fortunes and lives in danger, and the threats to Magnum's life weren't a joke, but it was also breezy and easy to swallow. That's why the ending to the episode "Did You See the Sunrise?" was so memorable. It was stone-cold.