When approached to direct a proposed movie version of this series, an enterprise that has been repeatedly undertaken and then shelved over the past twenty years, Quentin Tarantino took a look at the show for the first time and discovered that it "sucked." The tardiness of his discovery made me laugh. The show, despite its popularity, did "suck," and can now clearly be seen as having done so, but in ways that were uniquely bizarre.
First, it was incredibly boring. Coming two years after the spy shows, where characters trotted the globe and saved or overthrew governments, here was an "action" show where nothing ever happened.
Of course no show is bad a hundred percent of the time, and this one had a few episodes that stood out from the rest. One of the best was in effect a one-set, two-character play confined to a hotel room where the lead cop, McGarrett, was holed up with a woman he was protecting against an ex-boyfriend she had sent to prison, who had escaped with the announced intention of paying her back. The story traced the shifting balance between the two characters and built to a neat twist ending where everything turned out the opposite of what it had appeared.
Another good episode with a twist in its tail was a portrait of an emotionally blocked Marine who was suspected and convicted of rape, but who turned out in the end to be physically incapable of it due to an accident some years before. He had arranged to incriminate himself so "the other guys wouldn't find out I'm not a man."
These episodes were the exceptions. For the most part, the "action" of the show was inaction: dull square stodgy men standing around talking: middle-class white men in suits; lower-class Hawaiians in Hawaiian shirts; and the occasional Southern redneck (on this show, all the rednecks were grinning, degenerate loonies). The outlook of the show was so unhip as to make it appear that the writers had been locked in a vault for most of the century. Their hippies and leftists, spouting impossible slogans, were on about the same order of reality as characters in Dick Tracy comics. One radical group, for instance, ran a theater company; in another episode "Danno," McGarrett's lieutenant, was cornered by a ring of beefy, flower-shirted "acidheads." The show's dialogue wrought weird changes on the slang of the era: "What's your bit?" (i.e. "bag"); "Are you ready to let it happen?" (cf. "What's happening?"); "You flip me, man"; or (describing a soup) "Guaranteed to blow your stomach." Plus the occasional faux-redneck argot: "I'll shoot him between his funky Russky eyes." Nobody ever talked like that; I doubt that the writers ever heard anybody talk. Not to mention McGarrett's penchant for sententious (and, for a cop, unlikely) quotation: "You know, Danno, someone once wrote that every man's death diminishes me, because I am a part of all mankind." When the show wasn't doing cop stories, it was doing equally boring spy stories which, despite the boringness, were so implausible as to make The Man from U.N.C.L.E. look like a CIA dossier.
But the primary object of fascination on the show now, seen as a cultural artifact, is its leading man. Like William Shatner on Star Trek, Jack Lord started out as a competent, stolid B-Western type of hero but gradually, left to his own devices and his own ego, became ever hammier and more narcissistic. His line readings grew slower and more self-infatuated by the year; he would issue the most mundane orders, like "Run a check on that plate," as if he were delivering a soliloquy from Hamlet, and punctuate them with gestures that had obviously been thought out and rehearsed beforehand but came out limp and silly: pounding his fist on a desk, snapping his fingers several times in succession, as if to say "Let's get cracking." And as if to gratify his ego, his co-stars were made to hang on his orders like a retinue of dependent courtiers, all but bowing as they exited while promising to get right on it.
Unaccountably, Hawaiian shows always seem to have a gay subtext, and some of Lord's wardrobe choices on this show are difficult to interpret otherwise. In one scene he is introduced lounging in a hip-length lemon yellow bathrobe; in another he sports a white plantation suit, a flashily colored ascot, and a broad-brimmed plantation hat.
Some of the other eccentric touches in his characterization are not easily interpretable. During a visit to Los Angeles, where a research librarian whose aid he has enlisted develops an immediate, unaccountable infatuation for him, he parts from her with a kiss on the lips and a "So long, chicky baby." In another episode, he's planted in a prison cell to trick a convict into dropping information about some stolen loot (an announcer at a microphone feeds a fake news story of Lord's arrest into the convict's radio, just like on Mission: Impossible), and impersonates a "con" by affecting a sideways grin, dropping the "g" at the end of participles, and chewing on a toothpick. Later, when he and the con's gang are holed up together in a hotel room, he affects a pair of shades and an orange turtleneck and pounds the sideboard like a set of bongos. He acts like a crazy gay man with the delusion he's James Cagney, but none of his companions seems to notice.
Now I come to think of it, given Tarantino's penchant for ineffectual macho goofballs, he might have been able to do something with this material, after all.
First, it was incredibly boring. Coming two years after the spy shows, where characters trotted the globe and saved or overthrew governments, here was an "action" show where nothing ever happened.
Of course no show is bad a hundred percent of the time, and this one had a few episodes that stood out from the rest. One of the best was in effect a one-set, two-character play confined to a hotel room where the lead cop, McGarrett, was holed up with a woman he was protecting against an ex-boyfriend she had sent to prison, who had escaped with the announced intention of paying her back. The story traced the shifting balance between the two characters and built to a neat twist ending where everything turned out the opposite of what it had appeared.
Another good episode with a twist in its tail was a portrait of an emotionally blocked Marine who was suspected and convicted of rape, but who turned out in the end to be physically incapable of it due to an accident some years before. He had arranged to incriminate himself so "the other guys wouldn't find out I'm not a man."
These episodes were the exceptions. For the most part, the "action" of the show was inaction: dull square stodgy men standing around talking: middle-class white men in suits; lower-class Hawaiians in Hawaiian shirts; and the occasional Southern redneck (on this show, all the rednecks were grinning, degenerate loonies). The outlook of the show was so unhip as to make it appear that the writers had been locked in a vault for most of the century. Their hippies and leftists, spouting impossible slogans, were on about the same order of reality as characters in Dick Tracy comics. One radical group, for instance, ran a theater company; in another episode "Danno," McGarrett's lieutenant, was cornered by a ring of beefy, flower-shirted "acidheads." The show's dialogue wrought weird changes on the slang of the era: "What's your bit?" (i.e. "bag"); "Are you ready to let it happen?" (cf. "What's happening?"); "You flip me, man"; or (describing a soup) "Guaranteed to blow your stomach." Plus the occasional faux-redneck argot: "I'll shoot him between his funky Russky eyes." Nobody ever talked like that; I doubt that the writers ever heard anybody talk. Not to mention McGarrett's penchant for sententious (and, for a cop, unlikely) quotation: "You know, Danno, someone once wrote that every man's death diminishes me, because I am a part of all mankind." When the show wasn't doing cop stories, it was doing equally boring spy stories which, despite the boringness, were so implausible as to make The Man from U.N.C.L.E. look like a CIA dossier.
But the primary object of fascination on the show now, seen as a cultural artifact, is its leading man. Like William Shatner on Star Trek, Jack Lord started out as a competent, stolid B-Western type of hero but gradually, left to his own devices and his own ego, became ever hammier and more narcissistic. His line readings grew slower and more self-infatuated by the year; he would issue the most mundane orders, like "Run a check on that plate," as if he were delivering a soliloquy from Hamlet, and punctuate them with gestures that had obviously been thought out and rehearsed beforehand but came out limp and silly: pounding his fist on a desk, snapping his fingers several times in succession, as if to say "Let's get cracking." And as if to gratify his ego, his co-stars were made to hang on his orders like a retinue of dependent courtiers, all but bowing as they exited while promising to get right on it.
Unaccountably, Hawaiian shows always seem to have a gay subtext, and some of Lord's wardrobe choices on this show are difficult to interpret otherwise. In one scene he is introduced lounging in a hip-length lemon yellow bathrobe; in another he sports a white plantation suit, a flashily colored ascot, and a broad-brimmed plantation hat.
Some of the other eccentric touches in his characterization are not easily interpretable. During a visit to Los Angeles, where a research librarian whose aid he has enlisted develops an immediate, unaccountable infatuation for him, he parts from her with a kiss on the lips and a "So long, chicky baby." In another episode, he's planted in a prison cell to trick a convict into dropping information about some stolen loot (an announcer at a microphone feeds a fake news story of Lord's arrest into the convict's radio, just like on Mission: Impossible), and impersonates a "con" by affecting a sideways grin, dropping the "g" at the end of participles, and chewing on a toothpick. Later, when he and the con's gang are holed up together in a hotel room, he affects a pair of shades and an orange turtleneck and pounds the sideboard like a set of bongos. He acts like a crazy gay man with the delusion he's James Cagney, but none of his companions seems to notice.
Now I come to think of it, given Tarantino's penchant for ineffectual macho goofballs, he might have been able to do something with this material, after all.