'Hawaii Dive-O.' A Revisionist View Of The Beloved Cop Show
06/02/2010
RJ Brown/Civil Beat
Watching Jack Lord play Steve McGarrett on "Hawaii Five-O" reveals three constants: He always wears a suit, his coiffed hair is perfectly in place and his detective skills are unerring.
The show, which broadcast from 1968-1980 and plays in perpetuity in reruns, reveals something about Hawaii, too — that it's not exactly a place anyone would care to visit.
Scene after scene depicts abandoned warehouses, rusty boat yards, dilapidated houses, sparse apartments, seedy nightclubs, vacant lots, ragged cliffs, and hot and dusty cane fields.
Sure, we see nice beachfront properties in Kahala, but in many cases they are occupied by the bad guys. Victims always ends up face down in the swimming pool or shot while attempting to hide behind a palm tree.
When a scene is filmed at a hotel — quite a lot of them, actually — it's not exactly E Komo Mai. The rooms are sterile, a place for the good guys and bad to hole up until HPD comes knocking on the door.
