owned a helicopter he used to fly workers to oil rigs.īellisario, the Medium article noted, pitched the idea of combining his and Larson’s H.H. Flynn who lived in California, was the permanent house guest of a millionaire, drove the mogul’s Ferrari and was friends with two fellow Vietnam vets, Rick and T.C. He wanted to play a character that not only had a humorous side but also one that might mess up an investigation and have to battle his way back from failure.īellisario had previously worked on an idea for a series about a private eye named H.H. “I just don’t want to play what I look like,” Selleck told Bellisario. He didn’t want to play an infallible hero. Selleck, a household face thanks to the ads for Salem cigarettes and a handful of Western TV miniseries and movies, already had a good idea of the kind of series he wanted to do. In the Medium article, Bellisario noted that the “Magnum” script was a “rip” on James Bond movies, with Magnum as a stalwart private eye living in a cliff-top estate with a ferocious dog and piloting a hang glider equipped with … machine guns. Larson, the man behind series of that period like “Battlestar: Galactica,” originally planned a very different Thomas Sullivan Magnum than the one viewers ultimately grew to know and love.īellisario was not pleased with the pilot script that Larson passed along to him. It was a deal that would come back to bite Selleck.īut producer Glen A. “Hawaii Five-O” ended in 1980, after 12 seasons and 279 episodes, leaving a void for Hawaii-produced shows that could take advantage of the production infrastructure that “Five-O” had established.įor a 2018 Medium article recapping an Archive of American Television interview with “Magnum, P.I.” producer Donald Bellisario noted that CBS wanted another Hawaii-based show to allow them to maintain the “extensive studio” built for “Five-O.” Finding a show for former cigarette advertisement star Tom Selleck was also something of a priority for Universal: Selleck had starred in six TV pilot films that went nowhere, but was still serving under the terms of a development deal with the studio. Producing a Hawaii-set show in the Los Angeles area, like ABC had from 1959 to 1963 with the private eye drama “Hawaiian Eye,” was no longer acceptable to viewers. The series’ exotic nature felt real because it was real, thanks to the location shooting. Besides one of TV’s great theme songs (“Five-O’s” was written by Morton Stevens), the lead’s service in the Navy, exotic locales and undertones of espionage and global threat uncommon to most TV cop dramas, “Five-O” shared with its successor “Magnum, P.I.” production qualities that appealed to CBS and its viewers. “Five-O” featured Jack Lord, an actor with a stiff pompadour and a sense of humor to match, as the head of the island’s state police force. It is a gender-reversal that’s delightful in part because Weeks’ Higgins is the real kickass action star of the new series. This time, however, Selleck’s deck shoes are filled by Jay Hernandez and Higgins isn’t played by the pitch-perfect, supercilious John Hillerman but by Perdita Weeks. Selleck could play both the charming overgrown adolescent and daring action hero without even changing tropical print shirts.įor the past two seasons, the CBS reboot of the Selleck series has struck many of the same notes: a White Knight hero with a military background, surrounded by war buddies, serving at the whim of Robin Masters and butting heads with Higgins, Robin’s proper Brit majordomo with little tolerance for Magnum’s shenanigans. The series made Tom Selleck a star, and deservedly so. Thomas Magnum, a Vietnam veteran, was head of security for Robin’s Nest, the home of an elusive writer of bestselling thrillers. The short-short shorts.įor eight TV seasons, “Magnum, P.I.” offered the world a glimpse into paradise-admittedly, the paradise of a 1980s private eye living rent-free at a gorgeous Hawaiian estate.
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