Little Pieces of Paradise

One of the joys of streaming television is being able to revisit old shows from my childhood and find out if they’re any good.  One of these shows is “Magnum, p.i.,” a Donald P. Belisario production based out of Hawaii.  The show ran for eight seasons from 1980-88, and famously starred Tom Selleck, a bright red Ferrari 308 GTS, and the island of Oahu.

When I was a kid, my Dad was a huge fan of this show.  He’s the same age as Tom Selleck, and could be found throughout the 1980’s wearing khaki shorts, ballcaps, golf shirts and deck shoes with no socks.  He even had an Aloha shirt or two, and aviator sunglasses.  And anyone who knows my dad knows that he’s had a moustache since the 1970’s, so there was that, too.  He and Magnum also have the same wristwatch.

Back in the early 80’s the only color TV in my parents’ house was on a cart in their bedroom, and at night my dad would sit in his VMI rocking chair and watch TV.  My mom would sit on the bed, her back to the headboard, and I would sit on the floor at the foot of the bed, beside the rocking chair.  But not when Magnum was on.  When Magnum was on, my mom usually sat in the rocking chair, and Dad laid on the bed, with his feet up by the headboard and his head at the foot of the bed, a pillow doubled over under his chest, behind his crossed arms, and I’d sit or lay next to him.  I didn’t necessarily follow the storylines back then, but I loved the car, the helicopter, the colorful shirts, the tropical guest house, and all of the Hawaii.  Like all little boys, I also just liked whatever my dad liked.

These days I get teased by some of my friends for being “nostalgic,” and it would be easy to say that revisiting my old favorite TV shows was some kind of way to recapture my childhood.  Maybe it would even be true, I’m not sure.  But a lot of the shows I liked back then are actually pretty awful, and after an episode or two I can’t continue watching them.  Magnum, though, I’ve had a long-standing appreciation for.  Being able to watch it straight through, no missing episodes, has been a treat.

It’s a tendency we see a lot of in the modern world, to judge earlier time periods by modern standards.  I think it’s funny that Magnum is remembered mostly for the car and, these days, for his shorts being very short.  The thing is… the car didn’t belong to Magnum, and in the 80’s, men’s shorts just WERE that short.  Boys’ shorts, too.  That’s just what we looked like.

So, how did the show come about?  CBS television had just ended production on the original “Hawaii Five-O” and they wanted to make use of their assets in Hawaii, so that was the genesis of “Magnum, p.i.”  When Don Belisario, Glen A. Larson and Chas. Floyd Johnson created the show, they had actually intended Magnum to be an American James Bond, a suave, dashing ladies’ man with a visiting stewardess on each arm.  Tom Selleck, however, was tired of being cast in this type of role, and he told the producers he wanted to do something different.

Around this time, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas were casting for “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”  Spielberg was adamant that he wanted Harrison Ford for the role of Indiana Jones, but Lucas, having worked with Ford on his last two films (“American Graffiti” and “Star Wars,”) was determined not to be the guy who only makes movies with Harrison Ford.  Selleck read for the role of Indiana Jones, screen tested, and was actually close to getting the role.  But Magnum was another potentially lucrative project, and the producers of the show had him in mind.  So Selleck told them, “I’m tired of playing what I look like,” and said they should either change the character of Thomas Magnum, or he’d go do “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”  Not wanting to give up their leading man, the producers relented.

As for those famous shorts, they can actually be chalked up to the wardrobe department doing a bang-up job.  Magnum’s backstory is that he’s a former Navy SEAL, who operated in Vietnam out of Da Nang, and in the late 70’s, after the war, he was stationed at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii as a Naval Intelligence Officer.  Lieutenant Thomas Sullivan Magnum woke up one day in 1978, and realized he was 33 years old and had never had a chance to be 23.  He resigned his commission from the United States Navy, and went into business as a private investigator, operating out of a crummy second-floor office in Honolulu, and driving a rusted out old VW Beetle.

Then, sometime around ’79 or ’80, before the start of the show, he was hired by best-selling author Robin Masters, to work security on his Hawaiian estate, Robin’s Nest.  Robin doesn’t live at Robin’s Nest, opting to spend most of his time in one of his other estates around the world, but he keeps Robin’s Nest as a resort for his friends, and for hosting various parties and charitable functions.  In exchange for his services, Magnum is quartered in the Guest House on the Estate, and has access to the tennis courts, the private beach with tidal pool, the wine cellar, and the garage – including a luxury sedan, a GMC Jimmy (later a Jeep Cherokee) and the Ferrari 308.  This is where we find Magnum, a 33-year old man in an Aloha shirt and his khaki, Navy-issue swim trunks, deck shoes with no socks, and a Detroit Tigers cap, living in a tropical bungalow surrounded by the few items collected from his life so far – a duffel bag, his handgun, a lot of empty beer bottles and pizza boxes, a gorilla mask, and a rubber chicken.

Yeah, you read that right.

Other visual reminders of Magnum’s service can be found in his wardrobe.  In the earlier seasons he frequently wears sailor dungarees and work shirts, and throughout the entire series he can be seen wearing a Navy-issue web belt with a Navy SEAL buckle, a navy blue ballcap with a VMO-2 Da Nang insignia, and a ring with a French Croix de Lorraine, the symbol of his old unit from ‘Nam.

He is not alone on the estate, however.  The estate is managed by a fussy little British majordomo, a retired Sergeant-Major named Jonathan Quayle Higgins III (John Hillerman), who served in the British Army in Africa, and in the Pacific Theater in WWII, where as a POW he helped build the famously ill-fated Bridge on the River Kwai.  Like Magnum, Higgins returned from his own war to go into intelligence, serving in MI-6.  Short, stocky, sporting a receding hairline and a not insignificant paunch, Higgins cuts a comical figure who takes himself, and everything else, far too seriously for Magnum’s tastes.  He rambles on in his posh accent about boring old war stories, fusses over his Dobermans, Zeus and Apollo, and hacks away at his memoirs in Robin’s study.

Although he lives in the lap of luxury, Magnum is perpetually broke and frequently enlists the help of his two best friends, also members of his old unit: retired Marine Corps helicopter pilot Theodore “TC” Calvin, and his diminutive old door gunner turned night club manager, Orville “Rick” Wright.  TC (Roger E. Mosley) is a hulking man with a kind disposition and the build of a heavyweight fighter.  He now runs a charter helicopter service called Island Hoppers. Rick (Larry Manetti)  can best be described as Joe Pesci wearing a Ray Liotta mask, and although in the pilot he runs a club called Rick’s Place, modeled on the club from Casablanca (hence his moniker), by the second episode he ends up managing the King Kamehameha Club, on the board of directors of which Higgins sits.

Magnum’s needing favors from his friends leads to some friction between them, as TC and Rick are perpetually putting themselves in harm’s way and expending resources in order to help Magnum run down leads, but they never see a penny from him, despite the fuel costs and frequent damages to TC’s Hughes 500D, and the fact that Magnum insists on meeting his clients in the King Kamehameha Club and has run up an extensive tab.  In addition, in the early seasons, Magnum is constantly having to barter with Higgins, using as currency his access to the tennis courts and wine cellar, and even, in desperate times, the Ferrari.

So does it still work?  Mostly, yes it does.  Although the production value is not always superb, what saves the show is its refusal to take itself too seriously.  Tom Selleck plays Magnum as a laid-back guy with a goofy sense of humor, who has seen and done enough rough things to know how and when to put on a hard face and put a bullet in a bad guy, but his narration, his dialogue, and his mannerisms are pretty quirky.  He also frequently breaks the fourth wall, looking directly into the camera with a self-deprecating grin when things don’t go his way – which is often.  At its best, the show is either very funny, or surprisingly dark.  As all of the main characters are veterans, mainly of Vietnam, and as it was the 1980’s, they used that to tell some very compelling stories (and made use of the  beautiful Hawaiian landscape to recreate southeast Asia).

I’m also at a point in my life where I find Magnum’s storyline compelling.  Not a womanizer, Magnum has been in love a couple of times and has lost his loves.  He is kind and respectful towards the women in his life, frequently charming but never smarmy, and always shows genuine compassion and tenderness.  Instead he is a grown-ass man living like a kid, not haunted by much of anything, but always searching for something that he can’t name.  As the series progresses he grapples with the dissonance between his age and his lifestyle, and the character begins to take on a deeper melancholy that he continually masks with his quirks.   Maybe I do cling a little too much to the past.  Maybe I constantly wrestle with the distance between where I am and where I’d like to be.  I don’t know where to find it.  I sure can’t afford to look for it on Oahu.  But the sunrises, the blue waters, the flowery shirts, the red Italian car and the flying Easter egg of a chopper all buoy my spirits just as they once did.

It’s not a solution, and my little voice won’t let me forget it, but for the time being it’s a coping mechanism, and until I find the way forward, I guess it’ll have to do.  I’ll carve off little pieces of paradise, 45 minutes at a time.  I mean what the hell.  They still make beer and pizza.