Hawaii Five Balls

So during my week off, I finished the first season of Hawaii Five O. As Season Finale’s go, it was quite a good one. The dissolution of the team, the seemingly air-tight case against McGarrett (still showing little-to-no emotion), Chen’s seeming heel turn, Kono’s impeding arrest and Dano’s life being relocated back to New York. It was a cliffhanger that left me eagerly awaiting the next season. And that’s quite an achievement, considering just how balls the show normally is.

Don’t get me wrong, I like a bit of bad TV. And what I like about Hawaii Five-O is that it knows it’s bad. But still, some of the storylines are ridiculous. The most ridiculous thing to my mind, is that this team of “super cops” took eight episodes to work out who was sending Steve objects from his father’s stolen tool box, yet still came up trumps against the Yakuza and organised drug dealers and gun runners.

Plus the guest stars are amazing. Mark Dacascos is now that “big bad” and it’s looking like the girl who used to play Alex Mack, in “The Secret World of Alex Mack” is joining the team, which is great as pre-teen Wez used to majorly fancy her. Now she’s all grown up, I kinda still do.

I think the epitome of just how ridiculous the show is came a few weeks ago, when Puff Daddy showed up as an undercover New York cop who was working for the FBI. In a botched assassination attempt, his wife and one of his FBI handlers are killed. Of course, the FBI should investigate, but oh no, Five-O have got jurisdiction (somehow). The icing on the cake was McGarrett telling the FBI: “we’ll find the murderers and solve this case”.

You can’t even solve the case of the missing toolbox.

Rebooting the past

As I’ve ranted about before, it seems that Hollywood are so completely out of original ideas that they need to keep rehashing old ones to try and maintain a grip on their audience. This seems to be especially prevalent in television at the moment.

It’s not always bad. The new Battlestar Galactica was a well constructed, multi-layed series, with complex characters and gripping storylines. To my mind one of the best television shows of the last ten years. But for every Battlestar Galactica there’s a V or a Bionic Woman or a Hawaii Five-O.

Actually, I’m being harsh. I quite enjoy the new Hawaii Five-O, and consider it one of my guilty pleasures. What I like about it is that it’s trash, that knows it’s trash. It doesn’t pretend to be anything else. Which is my problem with shows like Blue Bloods, which pretends to be high brow but is really just trash.

The other thing Hawaii Five-O has going for it is the cast. Despite Alex O’Loughlin being the world’s least expressive human, the show has Scott Caan who’s entertaining, Grace Park who seems to have the Midas Touch for reboots (see BSG again) and Daniel Dae Kim who, after Lost, must have instructed his agent that he only wanted jobs that were based in Hawaii.

I don’t have anything against reboots per-se. Hawaii Five-O, V, BSG et al were all decades old by the time they got rebooted. It’s when they start tossing around ideas like rebooting Buffy (which is apparently on the cards) that I get a bit twitchy.

Which brings me to the hideous trailer I saw the other day for the new Teen Wolf reboot. Now they’re p*ssing me off. Taking a beloved film from my childhood (my God it’s got Michael J Fox in it…the gold standard of eighties fare) and Twilight-ing it to appeal to a tweenie audience. The thought of it makes me physically sick. OK maybe mot physically sick, but close.

I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt though and won’t pass judgement until I’ve seen the first episode myself.

Expect a rant though.