Hawaii 5-0

Have not watched but a "wisecracking" McGarrett does not seem like the right direction if they want to tap into fans of the old show.

 

Fans of the old show are dying off.

 

H5O's original run was from 1968-80, but the last 4-5 seasons it was barely hanging on, so it's safe to say anybody who was a "big fan" of the show had started watching it by 1975, and probably born no later than 1965, so needless to say they are not aiming to build the fanbase of the new show around devotees of the original series.

Although it would be cool if they tried to keep SOME similarities with the original series.

 

Having not seen the original, I'm OK with them changing things. If you want things to be the same, why not just get DVDs of the original and watch those?

 

I think they want to keep it hip.

 

The fun is watching the non-hip act in a hip environment. For me, that was the appeal of "Dragnet."

 

Off-topic, but... Bristol, your avatar just made me laugh my ass off. That's awesome.

 

Well, this thread kind of slipped into oblivion, but the season finale of Five-O ran a few hours ago, and I must say over the course of the whole season the show did grow on me.

I quit worrying about what Jack Lord and James MacArthur would have done in a given episode and just learned to go with the flow. Caan's Dano, who I was sure I was going to hate, became a pretty engaging character.

They did work Wo Fat in as a recurring supervillain, but he only appeared once every three or four shows, and much of that offscreen as an unseen manipulator, so they didn't have McGarrett and Wo Fat squaring off every other week.

The season-ending episode was a pretty slam-bang cliffhanger. They certainly have a lot of loose plot threads to start picking up in September.

 

I stayed with the show the whole season and really enjoyed it. And the plot twists tonight were something else. I am looking forward to season 2 very much.

I must say, I read the thread from the beginning and had to laugh at the complaints the the father's murder was wrapped up too quickly in the pilot, knowing now that it was nowhere near solved at that time.

 

This show is really kitschy, but so was the original, in a different way. TV was so, so different back then. I watched it as a kid, then I recall watching reruns in the '80s and thinking that even then, it was really dated.
As a teenager during the glory days of the first show, I loved the episodes where James MacArthur would go undercover and feign "hipness." He was soooo .... not. My friends and I used to laugh hysterically when Danno would do something like explain to McGarrett that "grass" was the kids' lingo for "marijuana." (I don't know that he actually did that, but he did stuff like that, pretty often.)

I watched the new show off and on, and I have to admit it grew on me. Plots were usually ridiculous and the writing was lackluster, but the main characters, particularly Caan, got you interested. And Hawaii is the real star, as it was in the first series, back when most of us had never really seen it.

 

Eh, they play in a crappy conference and their non-con is less than enthralling. They'd better whip Boise State if they harbor BCS hopes.

 

Hell, I remember watching the PILOT of the original series, the week after my 10th birthday, in which Wo Fat kidnaps McGarrett and traps him in the sensory-deprivation tank, head wrapped in foam rubber, etc etc.

At the time, it seemed very cutting-edge and gritty. And the theme song, of course, was pretty kick-ass for 1968.