Meanwhile, Back at the Pineapple-Infested Hellhole...

The new Hawaii Five-0 isn't threatening to ever turn into anything more than a formula TV cop opera, and those of you with less constricted aesthetic standards than mine can be excused from any conversation in which it attempts to take center stage, but it is unusual for being one of the few "remakes" of a network TV series that gains a little something if you know your history well enough to compare it to the original. That series, the one that bequeathed the phrase "Book 'em, Danno" and the term "Five-0" as shorthand for "the police" to standup comedians and rappers of multiple generations, ran an inexplicable twelve seasons--from 1968, when LBJ was about to cede the stewardship of our nation to Richard Nixon, to 1980, before Ronald Reagan took the wheel from Jimmy Carter--and was the opposite of an ensemble show. It starred the late Jack Lord, who had previously hit the beach with his gun cocked as Felix Leiter in Dr. No, the first James Bond movie, and who, unlike Sean Connery, was not asked back to that particular franchise. Lord was the kind of star who was invariably referred to in TV Guide profiles as "a perfectionist", a term that, like "confirmed bachelor", was then understood, by regular readers of gossip magazines (such as my mother, who helped indoctrinate me in reading the code), to have a specific, unchanging meaning. Basically, it meant that he was such a pain in the ass on the set that, someday, lighting guys and grips and craft service people would be lining up taking numbers to dance on his grave.

Lord may not have been much of an actor--based on his twelve-year stint as Steve McGarrett, the deep-voiced keeper of order on the big island, it's impossible to tell--but he had the kind of ego-driven faith in his own charismatic importance that, onscreen, translates into a presence that eats up all the oxygen in the room, leaving nothing for the hapless players surrounding him. This may have made him a figure of fun; in the 1976 "collection of humor by women", Titters, Susan Toepfer wrote that "he has been known to swim in a bathing cap to protect [his hairstyle]...or perhaps its dark black coating. Lord gives his age as forty-six, but according to one reporter's calculations, this means the remarkable actor completed high school at age seven and married for the first time at nine." (According to Wikipedia, Lord was actually forty-seven when he first transmorgified into McGarrett.) But his inhuman dominance of all around him, and the way that it reduced those around him (such as poor James MacArthur, whose role as Danno required him to spend eleven years of his career on the wrong end of a sage-mentor/baby-faced-naif relationship) to bit players in his personal drama gave the show whatever interest it had, apart from its justly fabled theme song. (For me, the most perfect, iconic moment in the show's history comes when Lord makes his entrance during the opening credits. He's first seen, via a helicopter shot that seems to begin with the camera somewhere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, standing on a rooftop balcony. The copter swoops in as if to capture his face in close-up, and then, just when it's almost got him in tight focus, he spins around, and we cut to a shot of his face taken by someone sharing the balcony with him, as if he were telling the camera operator on the helicopter, "Sorry you had to come all this way, but I only work with my personal photographer.")

On the new show, McGarrett, now the head of a special team put created by the governor (Jean Smart) to protect her island from international terrorists, Russian gangsters, and other new-style ne'er-do-wells, is played by Alex O'Loughlin, who starred in the highly promoted, quickly canceled 2007 series Moonlight, giving him the special distinction, along with Nikolaj Coster-Waldau of New Amsterdam, to be one of the few actors of our time fail to achieve breakout stardom playing a romantic vampire. Besides Smart--who, surprisingly, delivers her speeches about how she gave you complete authority to fight crime but didn't think you'd do this with it! as if she had been genetically engineered for this very purpose--the cast includes Scott Caan in the "Danno" role, Daniel Dae Kim as a cop who has been driven out of the department for having been falsely thought to be dirty and seizes on a job offer fro McGarrett as his shot at redemption, and Grace Park as Kim's eager rookie cop cousin. In this company, O'Loughlin is the hole in the donut. (There was also a guest appearance in the second episode by Martin Starr as a pothead computer wizard. If the producers have any sense, they'll try to lure Starr back about once every third episode.) The show uses him the way Kevin Costner functioned in the company of Sean Connery, Charlie Martin Smith, and Andy Garcia in The Untouchables--a strategy that Pauline Kael compared to the way the seven dwarfs helped to set off Snow White. O'Loughlin is pleasantly dull even when he's torturing suspects, and it's as if he'd sensibly farmed out the job of entertaining the audience to his underlings so that he concentrate on the important things, like bouncing off the hood of a car just before another car collides into it or sticking a captured bad guy's thumb into a bullet wound so that he can use the blood to get a usable thumb print.

So far, the show belongs to Scott Caan, who has failed to really stand out in a number of movie roles but here, as in his doubles act with Casey Affleck in the Steven Soderbergh-George Clooney Danny Ocean movies, reveals himself to be absolutely brilliant at his specialty: playing guys who can only communicate with those they feel closest to be squabbling with them, and who rattle off elementary-school-playground insults and sarcastic expressions--"Why are you still talking? Why are your lips moving!?"--as if he thought he was doing original new material from Oscar Wilde. It's not the highest form of the actor's art, I guess, but it's something that a lot of actors have turned themselves into public nuisances by doing badly, and Caan does it the way Bruce Lee used to trash heroin dens. At one especially telling point in the latest episode, Caan fills O'Loughlin in on Martin Starr's character, telling him that he's always "baked like a po-ta-to", and O'Loughlin nods and mimes toking on an imaginary joint. It's as if the two had discussed the scene beforehand and O'Loughlin said, "How about you say your line in a funny way, and then I'll do something really obvious and unfunny that basically repeats what you said, for the people at home who are really slow?" That's their relationship, as characters and as actors, in a nutshell. (Not the least funny thing about this is that it comes almost directly after a scene in which Caan actually refers to McGarrett as "Detective Obvious".) Caan has also developed an amazing, watchable face; it looks strikingly handsome and even sensitive from some angles, lumpy and unreflective from others, and every so often he strikes an expression or delivers an inflection that reminds you so much of his father that you wonder when Brian Piccolo came back from the dead and graduated from the police academy. He's enough, for now. But if the show is going to want to avoid wearing out its welcome fast, they really need to give Daniel Dae Kim something to do besides look hurt that his old friends on the force won't talk to him at crime scenes anymore and let Grace Park do something besides look great while kicking ass.




Last night also marked the second and final time that I shall watch NBC's The Event, an ambitious attempt at a mind-fuck cult hit that, as such things go, makes Flashforward, last year's stillborn ambitious attempt at a mind-fuck cult hit, look like Philip K. Dick driving a motorcycle through the collected works of M. C. Escher with the Ditko-Lee period Dr. Strange in the bitch seat. If nothing else, the show deserves credit for having made it possible to exactly pinpoint the moment when any not unreasonably patient viewer's reaction to it abruptly shifts from bored irritation to red-eyed loathing of everyone in any way responsible for its existence.

That moment comes near the end of the latest episode, when the hero is sitting in the back of a car and tries to explain to the cops who've arrested him that he's been framed for murder and is on the run after having hijacked a commercial airliner whose pilot was being compelled, under duress by conspirators who had kidnapped his daughter, to try to assassinate the President of the United States by flying the plane more or less directly into his face. When he finishes his summary, which has been of great help to anyone who came in late, one of the cops sneers at him and delivers a speech of her own, a very long one, delivered in a tone of withering sarcasm, which goes something like this: Oh, wow, I'm sure that all that happened, it doesn't sound at all unlikely, gosh, you sure must be a really important person for all those people to go to all that trouble just to ball you up, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Heads up to anyone who might someday find themselves writing what's intended to become an ambitious mind-fuck cult hit: anyone who is going to give your work a try is going to know going in that unlikely and preposterous things will happen in it. Absolutely no one in your target audience is going to ever think, at any point, man, I sure do wish that one of the characters would complain, ideally sarcastically and at great length, that this is all very unlikely and preposterous. If that does happen, not only will it not magically make the whole thing seem much more probable and believable, but those of us watching will take it as a personal affront.