As flat as the visual is Alex O'Loughlin's Steve McGarrett. O'Loughlin most recently crashed and burned on TV in Three Rivers. As we noted of the heavy push by CBS to portray O'Loughlin as sexy:
We wondered at the time: (a) Why is CBS telling us there's a sexy man on a new show, (b) why is the voice telling us this male, (c) why does this O'Loughlin look like Noah Wylie in a shower cap and (d) who the hell is supposed to find that sexy?
In answer to the last question: Gay men into body fur.
We repeatedly asked straight women we knew if they thought Alex was really that sexy looking? No, especially not with that hair cut. Then we brought the issue up with some gay male friends who told us there was an entire cottage industry devoted to O'Laughlin who is, apparently, bringing furry back. (If so, he's several chests too late. We already noted that trend this fall.)
Since we wrote that, not only was Three Rivers given the axe but O'Loughlin also crashed and burned in The Back-up Plan on the big screen. For those who missed it (a large number of people), The Back-up Plan was Jennifer Lopez' return to films. To be the beefcake in a Lopez film, all you have to do is smile a lot, remove your shirt and convincingly act as if you're in love with Lopez. As Matthew McConaughey, Ralph Fiennes and Michael Vartan have demonstrated, it is not a difficult task. It was, however, beyond the meager talents of O'Loughlin.
Hawaii Five-O is already shaping up as O'Laughlin's third TV strike. Along with Three Rivers, he also crashed and burned in Moonlight. Like H50, those two also aired on CBS. It's a rare thing for a network to give an actor three chances -- in four years -- to carry the lead in an hour long program so the big question in the industry is exactly who adopted O'Loughlin as their boy toy?
Why exactly he was cast as Steve McGarrett is even more puzzling. In the original Hawaii Five-O (1968-1980), Steve McGarrett was played by Jack Lord. That Steve was fond of many ladies. So what ethno-centric xenophobia resulted in the remake Steve being Anglo? Steve spent his life on the islands and it makes a lot more sense for Daniel Dae Kim to play the new Steve McGarett instead of Chin Ho Kelly. This is especially driven home when you note that Kim has a full head of hair -- as did Lord -- while O'Loughlin is battling with a receding hairline and losing.
Apparently speaking for the viewers, Scott Caan tells O'Louglin, "There's something wrong with you, You know that, right?" We think everyone knows that -- except for maybe one CBS executive. Scott Caan's playing Steve's roll dog Danny and probably doing everything wrong. How else to explain that he's the only consistent life in the show? He dominates every scene he's in, giving it his all and burning down repeatedly like a forgotten cigarette. Why such a strong actor is playing second banana to anyone -- let alone Mr. Limpid Alex O'Laughlin -- has to be the great puzzler of fall 2010. It's as if someone decided to remake Smokey & the Bandit but this time wanted Dom DeLouise in the lead and Burt Reynolds as the sidekick.
It's also a puzzler why Daniel Dae Kim decided to follow Lost with this? He's third banana, behind Caan, and desperate to do something but always on the edges of the action until the very last minute. Shoot out during a football game! Steve and Danny are on it! After the guns stop firing, send in Chin Ho to chase down a guy that he lets escape. Shoot out at a party! Steve and Danny are on it! After the bulk of the bullets are fired, Chin Ho shows up to shoot one.
If anyone's got it worse than him, it's Grace Park who plays police detective Kona Kalakaua. Remember the football game shoot out? You've got at least three suspects with guns and Kona's doing what? Playing glorified flight attendant as she waives the crowd through the gates and does everything but place a lei around the neck of each departing spectator. Remember the party shoot out? She and Danny barge in on a violent interrogation posing as a couple making out. Then Steve starts firing, Danny starts firing and, somehow, Chin Ho makes it all the way across the estate to join in on the shooting but Kona spent the whole time hiding behind a fake palm tree. If Danny can fit in a gun in his tuxedo, then she should have been able to have carried one in her skimpy get-up. If not, police woman Kona shouldn't have worn that sheer dress on an undercover mission.
But it's all about the T&A for Kona. And that's a new element that wasn't in the original. For the bulk of the original show's run, women were guest stars or secretaries -- like the always groovy Susan Dey whose H5-0 guest spot we were noting in 2005. By making a woman part of the core team, an ugly dynamic becomes more apparent -- even if no one seems to want to acknowledge it.
As in the original, Steve and his sidekick are played by Anglo Whites. And they're running things -- even the governor of the state is played by an Anglo White. They're running the missions, they're running everything -- even the native people of Hawaii. And if it were just Chin Ho, you might not catch on to that. But when you have Chin Ho sidelined time and again and you've also got Kona so far removed she's not even sidelined, she's stuck in the stadium, you start to wonder why the remake wasn't called Hawaii Five-O: White Man's Burden?
And that's part of the Big Ugly the reboot brings to the small screen each *Monday* as it closes out CBS' prime time line up. The state hoped the show would boost tourism and maybe it will? Despite the fact that it makes everything look flat and uninteresting, despite the fact that the season's main plot is that gangs have infiltrated the islands, despite the fact that Hawaii is portrayed as a lawless -- including the lawless police as Greg Felton (Dissident Voice) has pointed out. But we keep coming back to the fact that Anglo Whites make up only 24.3 percent of Hawaii's population and yet they dominate this show.
It's like a bad dream. And those two words really do describe the reboot as you watch the new Steve McGarrett push suspects off roofs, hold their legs and threaten to let go, as you watch one washed out backdrop after another and realize that even postcard 'art' is beyond this show. Thus far, only David Lynch's Twin Peaks has ever really utilized imagery, space and time in any way resembling dreams or the work of Jean Cocteau. And while no one expected that from Hawaii Five-O, they had every right to expect something visually attractive.
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Ava and C.I. note, "*" indicates date correction. Monday nights is when the program airs, not Sunday as we wrongly wrote. Our apologies.
