“There are a lot of animals out there....some of them walk on two legs.”

Jack Lord as Steve McGarret, in ‘Hawaii 5-0.’


A few months ago I noticed that Hawaii 5-0 was back on the air.

The time slot is not perfect. Five past one in the morning on the brand new channel ‘M.’ The station seems to have some kind of multicultural angle; I guess that’s the only way you can get a license off the CRTC these days. If I went to the bureaucrats with my pitch for a WASP channel where people drink a lot, I’d probably be laughed out of town.

I can only assume that some programmer on Channel ‘M’ latched on to the fact that 5-0 includes a Chinese guy and a Hawaiian, and figured that it fit with the station’s multicultural values. The fact that the Chinese guy and the Hawaiian spend every episode doing joe work while Jack Lord’s Steve McGarrett kicks open the front door to the bad guys’ hideout doesn’t seem to have registered.

Nonetheless, it’s a great show. Here’s why:


ONE: The opening theme.

One of the most recognizeable pieces of music in the world. The 5-0 theme leads in with a few bars of drums--a great device--then kicks into a number so groovily high-powered that Sammy Davis Jr. once adopted it as the intro to his nightclub act.

But the music is only part of it. If you look at the camera work and editing of the opening theme, it’s a monster of a pitch. The jagged zoom-in on Jack Lord, standing on a balcony at the Ilikai Hotel, is particularly superb. The rest of it is full of gyrating hula-dancers, jet engines, sunsets and bullet chambers, all pulsing to the drums.


TWO: The setting.

It’s amazing how many 5-0 characters have waterfront property. Judging by this show, every guy with a waterfront lot in Honolulu is a criminal. Even the small time hoods spend a lot of time near the ocean. You need to dump a body or a weapon? Try Diamond Head. Need to consult a hitman about a contract? Why not meet at Waikiki?

But the the 5-0 writers went a step further, cannily casting Hawaii as America’s last wild west; an isolated frontier ‘town,’ with McGarrett as the sheriff. Only it’s a different kind of wild. No grimy desperadoes or pancho-wearing bounty hunters. The 5-0 frontier of the late ‘60s and 1970s is full of Red Chinese agents, tripping hippies, acid-dropping cultists, whacked-out Vietnam vets, murderous ‘Eurasian’ vixens, exiled dictators, hitmen from Hong Kong, recycled Kamikazes from World War Two, tourist-devouring scam artists.... Even by 1970’s standards, the show has its own special menagerie of freaks, all fodder for the 5-0 deputies.


THREE: The guest stars.

I once saw a list of the number of Academy Award winners and nominees who have guest starred on 5-0, and it runs into the several dozens. Add to that the actors who appeared on the show before becoming famous: John Ritter (Three’s Company) as a hippy killer; Gaven McLeod (Mary Tyler More, Love Boat) as a turtleneck-and-bead wearing dope pusher named Big Chicken; Martin Sheen as a shark-like lawyer; Loretta Swit (MASH), who appeared serveral times, either jumping off a building, getting pushed into the ocean or getting run over by a car; Ricardo Montalban (Fantasy Island) on two occasions, first decked out in hilarious ‘oriental’ makeup, playing a wayward Japanese ‘Bushido,’ then as a race car driver who had conquered “Watkins Glen and Quebec.”

I suppose a studio-paid jaunt to Hawaii, with a brief guest-star appearance and a week or two in paradise was a draw for the big names who appeared on the show. But it’s the countless no-name actors who went on to better things that intrigue me. For them, a spot on 5-0 had a Feng Shui-like magic to it; a crazy kiss of life.


FOUR: The supporting cast.

‘Book ‘im, Danno,’ is perhaps the most famous line to emerge from the series. It’s the line McGarret gives to his deputy, Danny Williams, whenever they catch the bad guy. Danny Williams was played by an actor named James MacArthur. He is the adopted son of golden age actress Helen Hayes and her playwright husband Charles MacAurthur. The shortish and stocky MacAurthur was, in the 1960’s, touted as ‘the next James Dean.’ This didn’t work out so well, and 5-0 producer Leanard Freeman, seeing him more as an everyman cop, cast him as ‘Danno.’ To his credit, MacAurthur put the James Dean aspirations aside and contentendly set about being a grounding foil to Lord’s somewhat haughty McGarrett.

The rest are Coronation Street-like pseudo-amateurs. There is, for instance, Zulu as Kono. I once thought of claiming that as a domain name, only to find that it had already been taken. A likeable presence on the show, Zulu could pass for a Polynesian rugby player except that his ass is so fat it lags in a different time zone (or, given that it’s in the middle of the Pacific, I guess it would be a day ahead).

Zulu, or Zoulou, as he is now known, was regrettably booted off the show after the fourth season following a tiff with Jack Lord. He was replaced by another Hawaiian, Al Harrington as detective Ben Kokua. Harrington had a nightclub act after the show finished. A former co-worker of mine went to see him, and was unnerved to find that he leered down her dress, commenting to the audience on how well-endowed she was. Harrington's departure in the show's 7th season marks for me the beginning of the decline of the series. A revolving door of token native characters came after him, none as robust as he and Zulu.

The best of the supporting cast is Kam Fong, who played the curiously-named Chinese cop Chin Ho Kelly. Fong was about 25 years old when his wife and two kids were wiped out in a freak accident. It was 1944, and two American bombers collided in mid-air over his house in Hawaii, crashing down on his family. The distraught Fong carried on aimlessly for a time before deciding to put a revolver to his own head, only to be interrupted pre-triggersqueeze by his mother. He rebuilt his life, becoming a cop for seventeen years. His name was put forward for a cattle call audition to become a extra in the 5-0 series without his knowledge. When he showed up on a lark, Leonard Freeman said “That’s him...that’s Chin Ho!” He was impulsively cast as one of the core characters.

Fong represents the endearing anti-professional streak that runs through the otherwise slick 5-0 production. He looked exactly like the kind of guy you would expect to be a career cop, and the fact that he couldn’t act didn’t get in the way of his getting the role. There are a lot of locals who got stints on 5-0 this way. Far from weakening the show, they add a nice touch of accessibilty and authenticity.


FIVE: Jack Lord.

Jack Lord was by most accounts a difficult guy to work with, but for me he warrants a certain admiration. A prickly loner, Lord came by his success late in the day. He spent many years scrounging for parts in Hollywood while generally hating the whole town’s guts. In his mid-forties, he got the lead in a western series, but it died in a year. Finally, at 48 (although he often fudged his birthdate on his bio), he teamed up with Leanard Freeman to do 5-0. It was fitting that he had to move to an entirely remote location to achieve his break.

In some ways he modelled the Steve McGarret character after himself. McGarret has little social life that we see. He’s an obsessive who cracks a smile about once every five episodes. And quite a few things piss him off.

“The 5-0 formula is as tight as a sonnet,” Lord once said, and he threw a lot of weight around to make things how he wanted them. He was even known to grab the odd unsolicited script from a fan and force it on the show’s writers. But it worked. 5-0 ran for a long time, from 1968 to 1980; until the Law and Order franchise started up it was the longest running crime show in TV history. It's been in syndication in one place or another ever since. The sun never sets on Hawaii 5-0.

The fact that we don’t know much about McGarret works to the show’s advantage. Large parts of his character are left to our imagination. We do know that he's a straightlaced stickler for the right thing, a trait that puts him at odds with the big-screen enforcers of the era--Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry; Charles Bronson’s ‘Death Wish’ vigilante; Gene Hackman’s Popeye Doyle.

“We’re cops, not judges,” he snaps at an underling in one episode, while trying to save the life of a dope pusher.

In many respects McGarrett, fused with Lord’s narcissism, is a prototypical metrosexual; in one episode, we learn that he gets his hair cut once a week. But he also has a deep and winning aversion to the smugness that is typical of most of the world’s jerks. Cool and aloof, but also a seething, dogged straight-edge, he’s the perfect anti-asshole.

There’s a scene in ‘Annie Hall’ where Woody Allen and Diane Keaton are standing in a movie lineup. Allen overhears the guy behind him talking about Marshall McLuhan. Thinking the guy’s full of crap, Allen gets into an argument with him, then finally reaches around a sign and pulls out the real McLuhan, who sides with Allen in the argument.

I often wish I could pull out Steve McGarrett as I go about my business. He would be armed with his black shades, blue suit, and some of his quotes from the show:

“You’re liable to catch a bummer you didn’t figure on,” he’d smirk at obnoxious motorists.

“I'm fed up with your pomposity and bad manners,” he’d snap at snotty store clerks.

“Cut the juvenile jive,” he’d spit at irritating co-workers.

“Aloha, suckers,” he would hiss at local politicians when they finally get their electoral comeuppance.

And if we should get any apologies or penitent looks, he’d have none of it:

“Yeah, yeah....hotshots like you are always sorry when the damage is done.”