“Caledonia, It’s Worth A Fortune"

Click here for the answering machine gag.

Sorry I was away so long. The reasons for my absence were compelling, to me, but they don’t make for fascinating reading. So mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, and we’ll move on.

After several episodes that were twisty and, to a greater or lesser degree, dark, we come upon “Caledonia, It’s Worth A Fortune”, a tale devoid of twist and so light that it hovers in midair. While the episode makes for a painless hour of television, with a few amusing lines here and there, it’s one of the less memorable entries in The Rockford Files’s first season.

(Parenthetically, and to pad a short review, one of the more selfish reasons I’m dreading the Rockford Files remake is that I’m going to have to start calling my preferred version of the show The Rockford Files: The Original Series, which takes so much longer to type. And no, calling it TRF:TOS doesn’t make me any happier.

Though what I’m really dreading is the day I have to type My Mother The Car:TOS. I hear they’ve attached Josh Hartnett.)

Jolene Hyland has a problem. Her husband, in prison and in need of a life-saving operation, just told her that something he buried in the town of Caldeonia is “worth a fortune”. So she hires Rockford, who comes in for a percentage of the recovery, to help her search the town and find the loot. Of course, this being a somewhat more sober version of It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, Rockford and Jolene can’t be the only contenders for the cash. There’s Leonard Blair, Jolene’s ex-lover and her ex-husband’s partner in the theft. There are two bruisers whose names don’t count for much. They’re mean, violent, and stupid. That’s all we need to know. Finally, there’s the local constabulary who, like all local constabularies, wants Rockford out of town, though it seems that his reasons have little to do with keeping law and order.

Get the players to their marks. Ready, set, go, for an hour whose plot depends mainly on Rockford and Leonard jerking each other around. See, Leonard knows the directions to the treasure from a starting point. Rockford, through Jolene, knows the starting point. Because nobody trusts anybody, they take forever to work out a structure that allows all of them to go after the money, which is strange. You’d think Leonard would want to wrap this up quickly, what with the two prognathous jawed thugs appearing at intervals to kidnap and beat the shit out of him, but greed does funny things to people, which I suppose is the episode’s point.

Of course, in the end, there is no money. There’s just a note from Jolene’s husband, who set the whole thing up as a way of turning Leonard and Jolene against each other and having a good laugh at their expense. That Jolene would have used her share of the money to save the miserable convict’s life doesn’t enter into his thinking, which gives the episode a mild dose of irony. And Rockford finds a way to lose on the deal as well. The sheriff shows up and, disappointed that there’s no loot for him to steal (I mean, um, confiscate as evidence), charges Rockford with trespassing and burglary for digging up the note on private property.

As I said, this is one of The Rockford Files’s less inspired segments. There are some fun bits. I like the scene with the motel manager, where Garner does an expert imitation of a loudmouthed out-of-town jerk to wheedle out some information. And the scene in the barn where Rockford frees Leonard from the clutches of the thugs is well staged and exciting (and a break from the episode’s aforementioned around-jerking). Those aside, the characters are flat and the ending is predictable. It’s a rare caper comedy that ends with anyone actually getting the cash, but if a story’s not going to twist the end, I’d appreciate at least some bends in the middle.

Next time (in a week, friends, I swear) we go from one less inspired hour to two of The Rockford Files’s finest hours. Yes, true believers, I’m talking about the first season’s brilliant two-parter, “Profit and Loss” , featuring Ned Beatty (Deliverance, Nashville, Network).

“In Pursuit of Carol Thorne”/”The Dexter Crisis”

“In Pursuit of Carol Thorne”/”The Dexter Crisis”

Click the titles to hear their respective answering machine gags.

Why a doubleheader this time around? The smaller part of the answer is that I missed a week and have an anal compulsive need to stay current--when it comes to blog posts anyway. I apologize for my absence, but I’m sure you reading several managed to find some sort of foul, depraved way to amuse yourselves while I was up to my nipples in distractions. The second reason is that “In Pursuit of Carol Thorne” and “The Dexter Crisis” fit together thematically, so the law of review economy kicks in.

Almost all detective shows rely for their effects on a kind of fluidity of identity. It must be so, because if identities in detective shows were fixed, all the characters’ motivations would be as clear as the blue summer sky, and there’d be no mystery for their viewers to solve. The Rockford Files has so far presented us with a plentitude of characters who wear false faces, but there are usually at least a few characters, Becker, Beth Davenport, to help us stay grounded. The two episodes we’re examining today eschew that comfort, spinning us, and Rockford, like tops for eight acts. Never have so many employed so many angles, to steal so much, from so few.

“In Pursuit of Carol Thorne” starts us off with the titular character leaving a women’s prison. She catches a bus. Rockford’s on it. He’s tailing her, as is another investigator. Thanks to some tricky moves involving Rocky, some pay phones, and a flat tire, Rockford manages to isolate Thorne so that he can engage her without distractions. He pretends to be a bookmaker; she pretends to be a runaway bride in search of a quickie Reno divorce. Rockford teaches her how to bet on horses, and a friendship of two false identities develops.

Soon, we find out that Rockford’s working for a sweet old couple who wanted Rockford to track her down so that she’ll lead them to their missing son, or at least, that’s who Rockford thinks they are. Once Rockford finishes reporting to this old couple, they reveal themselves to be two con artists. What they want from Carol Thorne isn’t hard to guess: easily folding little green rectangles. Soon Rockford is caught with Carol, the thieves, and the trusting dimwit who has the money they all heisted from Camp Pendleton.

Rockford manages to sort out the whole mess, and leave most of the thieves high and dry. I say most, because when Rockford returns home, Carol demands her cut of the finder’s fee Rockford and the dimwit got for the money. Rockford refuses to pay, until Carol points out that he still owes her for some bets he supposedly placed when he was posing as a bookmaker. She ends up with over half his take.

“In Pursuit of Carol Thorne” is a perfect follow-up to the much darker and more intense “Find Me if You Can”. While there are moments of tension--several guns are aimed--the tone of the proceedings is that of a lightly comic caper, heavy on wordplay and strategizing, light on the life and limb stuff. What’s most fun is watching Rockford pinball among all the tricksters, struggling mightily to catch up with them, must less to get ahead. The improvising he has to do, the tap dancing just to stay in the game, plays superbly here.

“The Dexter Crisis” starts out more conventionally: rich stuffed-shirt (Tim O’Connor) wants Rockford to find the young woman he’s been diddling. When Rockford gets started though, he takes a bit of a fall down the rabbit hole, and not just because he ends up once again in that land of hustlers and desperate shitheads: Nevada. He meets the young woman’s roommate (a pre-Lou Grant Linda Kelsey), and she seems like an idealistic law student. But she turns out to be something more mercenary. She’s helping her roommate rip off a quarter million dollars from the stuffed shirt--a sum of money the stuffed shirt had never mentioned missing. It turns out that the stuffed shirt’s been following Rockford the whole time, using him as a bird dog so that he could steal his money back. Rockford figures this out and negotiates a finder’s fee for the money’s return. He then recovers the cash, and the stuffed shirt refuses to pay.

In outline, “The Dexter Crisis” is much like “In Pursuit of Carol Thorne”. Both of Rockford’s clients are older people who say they’re after a missing person but are instead after the money that person took from them. Both segments are set in Nevada. Both have Rockford posing as a professional in the gaming world and taking time to show the ostensibly naive young woman the finer points of gambling. And in both no one seems to be around to show Rockford a straight angle. He’s on his own, with only his wits to help him resolve the crisis and work out who’s real and who isn’t.

This episode is chock full of brilliant touches. Because I have the benefit of knowing where Linda Kelsey’s career would take her, I have to say that, once her character turned mercenary, I found it delicious to find her playing against a type that she hadn’t even established yet. Tim O’Connor plays his usual tightly wound upper class prig, which contrasts well with Garner’s Rockford--watch how O’Connor’s character defends his office against Rockford’s cigarette ash, forcing his secretary to carry out Rockford’s leavings in her bare hands and barring him from using a valuable saucer as an ash tray.

Equally fun is the office of Rockford’s private detective rival for this episode, the fantastically named Kermit Higbee. Higbee, who looks like a chainsaw sculpture in shades, shares his office with a middle-aged madame who runs a cut-rate escort service. When Linda Kelsey’s character steps into that office and overhears the madame’s conversation with a john, the look on her face is priceless. Higbee himself serves mainly as the episode’s red herring. He seems dangerous, but in the end, he’s just following the stuffed-shirt’s girlfriend around so that he can report her movements to the stuffed-shirt’s wife. Rockford punches him out at one point, and in doing so learns what hitting a chainsaw sculpture can do to the bones in one’s hand.

Restoring all names and identities to their rightful owners is central to the resolution of a detective story. It’s part of what gives the genre its wish fulfillment quality. At this, Jim Rockford is very good. Another part of wish-fulfillment, of course, centers on getting paid. At that, in these episodes, he’s once again very bad.

“Find Me If You Can”

Click Here for the answering machine gag

Before I get started on this one, I want to comment on some news relevant to Rockford Files viewers. It appears that David Shore, who plans to produce a reboot of The Rockford Files for NBC, plans to cast Dermot Mulroney as the private investigator. I met this news with--well, to be honest my dominant mood was a seething indifference--mild surprise. At first I wondered if someone had mistaken, as often happens, Dermot Mulroney for Dylan McDermott, who successfully played a somewhat Rockford-like character--the often-hassled-by-creditors litigator Bobby Donnell--on The Practice. But no, it’s Dermot Mulroney, an actor I remember most as a cop who took a bullet in the 1995 thriller Copycat, and as the boring architect Winona Ryder was engaged to in How To Make An American Quilt. I know he’s been in other movies, but whenever I see an entry in his credit list, I struggle to recall exactly who he played. This indicates either a chameleon-like ability to fit into a role, or a crippling case of Josh Hartnett Disease, defined in medical dictionaries as a disease that induces audiences to look to any part of the screen not inhabited by the actor’s face or form.

If it is the latter, it doesn’t augur well for the success of a future Rockford Files series. Successfully replacing a charismatic lead actor generally requires finding another actor with similar charm: Chris Pine for William Shatner, Mel Gibson (whatever you may think of his views) for James Garner. Maybe Shore thinks he’s found that in Mulroney, but I think the evidence of Mulroney’s career so far is against him.

That dealt with, on to “Find Me If You Can”, which opens with a clever hook. A woman (Joan Van Ark) drops by Rockford’s trailer with an unusual job offer: she wants Rockford to find her. Rockford, even though he once again is having trouble with the bank, is leery of the gig, thinking of it as a joke at first before wondering just what he might be getting himself into. But she hands him a hunk of cash, and it’s green, so he takes the job and offers her a drink. Rockford uses the drink glass to get her fingerprints, and with it her real name, Barbara Kelbaker. Once he contacts her again, he says he’s done with the job if she doesn’t explain what’s going on. Barbara refuses, but her apparent desperation arouses enough sympathy in Rockford that he presses on, until his investigation takes him to Denver, where lie the offices of Ralph Correll (Paul Michael Glaser), a man who overcame the name of Ralph to rise to the top of organized crime in Denver.

What follows is a series of tense encounters between Correll and Rockford. At first, it’s a little hard to swallow Correll as a mob boss. He’s a short man who dresses like a dandy, but Paul Michael Glaser convinces us quickly that Correll has no conscience under his $5,000 suits. Correll’s cold to the point of being reptilian, and it’s easy to imagine him killing over nothing. He also makes an excellent foil for Rockford. He’s smart, and he, like Rockford, knows how to pull tricks to get what he wants. Unfortunately for Correll, Rockford has one more card to play than he does. I love his reaction to losing: “You keep yourself covered too. Nice.” A pro to the end, that Ralph Carrell.

Paul Michael Glaser, like Lindsay Wagner, went on to a hit series shortly after his Rockford Files appearance, starring as the Starsky half of Starsky and Hutch. This explains why, despite his strong performance in this episode, he never appeared again on The Rockford Files.

Joan Van Ark does strong work here as well, though I’d have to say I preferred her later contributions to the series. Like Shelley Duvall in The Shining, she’s stuck being frightened out of her wits for much of the episode, which is perfectly justified, given her character’s predicament, but her future parts would allow her greater range.

Of note also is the development of the relationship between Rockford and Sergeant Becker. Note how Becker toys with Rockford, telling him he’s got information but holding it back, partly so that he can demonstrate to Rockford just how hard it was to gather said information, but also so that he can mess with Rockford’s mind a little before extracting a pair of Lakers tickets from him. Up to now Rockford’s gotten a bit more than he’s given in his relationship with Becker. Seeing that situation reversed is one of this episode’s small pleasures.

“The Big Ripoff”

Click here for the answering machine gag.

Herb Tarlek, the radioactive suited salesman from WKRP in Cincinnati, once articulated a theory that held that all the world’s conflicts came down to pants: the dungarees vs. the suits. According to Herb, the responsible, upper income suits are constantly losing ground to the younger, more iconoclastic dungarees and must learn to fight back if they’re to keep civilization from collapsing.

This theory doesn’t graft perfectly onto The Rockford Files. Rockford tends toward off the rack slacks instead of jeans, and I think Rockford would have serious doubts about the idea that iconoclastic youth was taking over much of anything. Still, it does come to bear. Rockford spends a lot of his time being hassled, and the source of his harasslement is usually wearing a suit.

In this case, the suit belongs brusque insurance executive Melvyn Moss. Rockford calls Moss after one of his clients stiffs him on a job. Rockford thinks that his client’s boyfriend, Steve Nelson, faked his own death and ripped off Moss’s insurance company for $200,000. Rockford plans to follow Nelson’s girlfriend in hopes of getting a line on Nelson, and he wants Moss’s company to front him some advance money.

What follows is a negotiation that freelancers the world over will recognize. Moss wants Rockford to chase Nelson’s girlfriend on spec, refusing to budge in hopes that Rockford will slip and tell him enough that he can recover the money without paying Rockford at all. They battle back and forth. Rockford drops his demand from $2,000 plus expenses to a measly $500 and Moss, satisfied that he has his pound of Rockford’s flesh, authorizes the investigation.

One of “The Big Ripoff”’s strengths is the number of intriguing supporting characters it packs into its forty-eight minutes. There’s Moss, of course--as effective a suit-and-tied irritant as Rockford has ever met. There’s the Sheriff Neal, whose scene is brief but leaves enough of an impression that he’s easy to buy as a potential antagonist. There’s Carl LeMay, a local gallery owner who throws flak Rockford’s way as a favor to Nelson’s girlfriend, an ex-love. And there’s Steve Nelson, the world’s luckiest man, who after ripping of an insurance company blunders on a disguise that stands to make him more money than the insurance ripoff ever could. All these characters, with their well-built personas and suggestions of subsurface tensions and needs, enrich the world of the story, making it seem less like an exercise in clever plotting and more like the product of the characters’ diverse motives.

Another strength of the episode is Marilyn Polonski, the artists’ model who holds the key to unraveling Steve Nelson’s disguise. Jill Clayburgh, whose performance set off the kind of vibrations that heralded the approach of her stardom, plays her as a fun loving charmer who seems flightier than she really is. Like Rockford, Polonski’s a freelancer who lives simply and has a sensible caution about scary people. She knows that the thugs who beat Rockford up didn’t come from Sheriff Neal, and once she draws a beard on Rockford’s picture of Steve Nelson, she works out that he’s the hot new primitive painter in town who sells through LeMay’s gallery. She thinks he stinks as a painter, but tells us that “half the artists in town think he’s great.”

Rockford eventually finds Nelson, but Nelson captures him, ties him up, and vanishes. He goes back to Melvyn Moss for an additional advance to track Nelson down again, but Moss tells him he’s no longer interested in anything Rockford has to say. Rockford works out that Nelson took Rockford’s advice and made a deal with Moss. As Moss smugly sneers at him, Rockford says the classic line: “Mr. Moss, do you know what you are?” Pause. “Yeah, you do, don’t you.” Herb Tarlek was wrong. The suits win, yet again forever and always.

Rockford doesn’t end up empty handed, though. In a funny last scene, Rockford finds out that Nelson sent him ten of his paintings, which, despite their obvious lousiness, command $2,000 each, covering Rockford’s loss of the finder’s fee. As Rocky says when Rockford tells him the price, “He does have a nice sense of color, don’t he?”

This wraps up all the plots, but it did leave me feeling a little less than satisfied. I wondered why we didn’t get more of a wrap-up of Rockford’s relationship with Polonski. I realize there was a lot of plot for the “Big Ripoff” to close, but Polonski’s character deserved more of a sendoff. Instead, she just vanished, which is the only flaw in otherwise estimable segment.

Notes

--I loved the silent opening of “The Big Ripoff”, which is where you’ll find the Suzanne Somers appearance the DVD promotes. Though Somers eventually became known for Three’s Company, Step by Step, and the Thighmaster, she spent much of the early 1970s making strong impressions in silent roles in pictures like American Graffiti. She lends wit and charm to a clever scene.

China Doll

“China Doll”

After the pilot made Thomas Magnum’s life look like a dream of girls, beer, and Ferraris, “China Doll” walks that back a bit. Only a bit, mind you. Magnum hasn’t had to move into a studio apartment wedged between two Jai alai courts. But his relationships with his friends (or, in the case of Higgins, his friendly nemesis), are now presenting some welcome nuances. His friends mock his abilities. They get mad at him when he abuses their willingness to do favors. The episode’s point, to a large degree, is to let us know that while Thomas Magnum is a charming, handsome fellow, he’s also someone whose friends, however loyal, sometimes find him hard to take.

This week’s adventure begins when a Tong society assassin murders the beardliest mariner in Hawaii to acquire a Chinese object d’art from the McGuffin dynasty. (The unlucky sea dog was a dead ringer for Captain Redbeard Rum from the second Blackadder series.) Cap’n Beardface McWhiskers, however, no longer had the vase. It’s now in the possession of an adorable Chinese woman who wants Magnum to safeguard it until she can move it to some super safe hiding place. The Tong society assassin, showing the sticktuitiveness of Yosemite Sam, chases Magnum, the lady, and the vase around the Island of Kauai, pausing occasionally to use his legendary crippling martial arts moves to pummel all who stand in his way.

What a sad situation Asian actors were in back in the 1970s and 1980s. They could be extras on M*A*S*H*, or they could be martial arts expert heavies in crime dramas. I think the two Asian guys with good roles on TV were Pat Morita on Happy Days and Jack Soo on the first season of Barney Miller. (Of the two, I think Soo had the better role.) The Asian actors in “China Doll” don’t fare particularly well. Mai Ling, played by Susie Elene, does most of the actual speaking, but she, like the vase she carries, is largely a plot device. Not much personality emerges from underneath the accent and the cryptic smiles. George Cheung, a veteran Asian character actor who’s been in, well, everything in the last 40 years, spends most of this episode doing martial arts and looking menacing. This he does well, but his character is allowed fewer dimensions than a Terminator machine.

Of course, it may be unfair to single out Asians as mistreated. So far, villains of every ethnic background on Magnum P.I. have been disappointingly underdeveloped. The pressure of carrying the episode once again rests on Tom Selleck’s charm and the continued development of the characters Rick, T.C., and Higgins. This the show handles well. I particularly enjoy the way the relationship between Magnum and T.C. is developing. T.C. is getting a little tired of Magnum bumming rides and asking favors, and at one point, after Magnum blows a fare for T.C.’s helicopter business, T.C. demands that Magnum finally pay for gas. I also enjoyed the way Rick and Higgins mocked Magnum’s mistaken belief that Mai Ling had hired him to protect her, rather than the vase. The strength of the by-play among these characters has been carrying the last two episodes of the show, but it would be a pleasant surprise to see some guest characters who do something other than furnish plot points.

Note:

--I guess I’ll have to wait a few episodes for the iconic theme music to arrive. The title instrumental for this episode sounds more like the music from Tom Berenger’s fictional TV series in The Big Chill.

“This Case is Closed” parts 1 & 2

“This Case is Closed” parts 1 & 2

Click here for the answer phone gag.

“This Case is Closed” leads with a fantastic hook. Rockford gets off a plane. Tired from his cross country flight, he calls his client and tells him that he ran into something weird back in New Jersey. He doesn’t elaborate but promises to explain all when they meet in the morning. On his way home, he spies someone following him in a gray Chevy. Rockford pulls a few maneuvers and loses his shadow. He then gets home and finds two guys trashing his trailer. These boys beat Rockford up, stick some heavy duty shades on him, and kidnap him to a fancy home up in the hills. The owner of the house tells him that if he doesn’t reveal his client’s identity, Rockford will be breathing dirt instead of air.

Obviously, this is a tense moment, but it’s also revealing. Rockford’s given up his clients’ names to other people who’ve threatened him, but here he tightens up. Maybe it’s the fellow’s limp, or his melodramatic approach, but Rockford doesn’t seem take this captor as seriously. Rockford offers instead to call his client and ask if he’d mind having his name revealed, but his host, unsatisfied, tersely tells him that he’s a dead man. Rockford seems surprised, and before he can do much more than say please, his captors abandon him in a beautifully furnished, and very locked, room. Rockford’s left with a lot of questions, all of which boil down to much the same thing, why have I been one step behind everyone since this case started, and how the hell did I end up here?

“This Case is Closed” keeps these questions in front of us for the length of the episode, introducing a variety of criminal and law enforcement players to a game that everyone seems to understand except Rockford. It all centers on Mark Chalmers, a playboy nightclub owner who’s engaged to marry the daughter of a bitter old rich coot who’s hired Rockford to dig up ugly things in Mark’s past. Rockford disdains the assignment, but his client drops the nastiness just long enough to keep our hero in his service. What Rockford finds out is that a lot of people are interested in Mark Chalmers--criminals, cops, feds--but no one wants to explain why. What’s apparent is that everyone thinks that Rockford knows more about Chalmers than he really does, and this sets him up all manner of trouble with the aforementioned mobsters, a stonewalling FBI agent, a meanspirited cop from New Jersey, and Chalmers’s beloved (who wants to hire Rockford to find out why Chalmers left him, not knowing that her father is Rockford’s client.)

In the special features of the DVD, James Garner speaks of complaining to the writers about the way the episodes just follow his character around. While I sympathize with his desire to take the occasional shooting day off, given his bad knees and bad back, following Rockford around is what makes this episode work. By sticking to Rockford’s point of view, we’re invited to think along with him as he tries to sort out all of these players and try to infer from their actions what the game is. We know what Rockford knows. When the mobsters take Rockford from their hills home, presumably to shoot him, and the feds turn up to rescue Rockford from their clutches, we wonder, as Rockford does, how they managed to figure out he was there, and why they were watching this mafioso’s activities. Were the feds the guys in the grey Chevy that followed Rockford from the airport? It’s fun sitting on Rockford’s shoulder in this one and trying to reason alongside him.

The supporting players in “This Case is Closed” are uniformly excellent. Heading the list is Joseph Cotten (Citizen Kane, The Third Man), playing bitter old rich coot Waner Jameson. His scenes with Garner are a pleasure to watch, with Cotten expertly playing a man who dislikes Rockford but dislikes needing him even more. (I love the way his voice seesaws through the line “I shoot a mean game of dirty pool.” It’s simultaneously threatening and so old Hollywood. I think that vocal style has been lost to time.) Sharon Gless (Cagney and Lacey) plays Jameson’s daughter with a sunny disposition that makes it hard to imagine her growing up in her Warner Jameson’s house, and James McEachin finds the right combination of impatience and officiousness as FBI Agent Shore.

Notes:

--One complaint I have with the DVD version of this episode is the overlong recap of part one at the beginning of part two. I do realize that seven days used to separate episodes and that there were no VCRs or other video recording devices in homes in the 1970s (except for a few prototypes used in test markets). But two things: the episode recaps in future “Rockford Files” two parters were considerably shorter, when the VCR situation wasn’t much better than it was when the series began, and even if there was an issue for viewers in the 1970s, why should today’s DVD watchers have to sit through a recap of an episode that they’ve probably just seen?

--Watch for the hotheaded New Jersey Cop from this episode (Eddie Fontaine). He’ll appear later on this season in the role of a hotheaded criminal. I’m sure he played a lot of hotheads on TV, which makes me think that I’d love to see him in the role of Osric in Hamlet.

Magnum P.I. “Don’t Eat the Snow in Hawaii”

Magnum P.I. “Don’t Eat the Snow in Hawaii”

I need some rich friends. I mean really. I love the friends I have, and they’re all nice to me. But none of them can give me free access to a guest house on an estate in the middle of a tropical paradise, or the keys to a Ferrari 308 GTS, or the gift of a refrigerator containing an bottomless supply of beers, wines, and whiskeys. Was it really beyond my powers, over the last twenty years or so, to befriend one insanely rich pulp novelist with a compound on the Big Island? Damn it how I’ve misspent my life.

Because none of us gets to be Thomas Sullivan Magnum IV, we have to settle for watching him. And from the first five minutes of the pilot of Magnum P.I., it’s clear that, some minor inconveniences aside, he lives a wish fulfillment life that would even have James Bond rethinking his career choices. Those checking out the Wikipedia entry for Magnum P.I. will see comparisons of this show to The Rockford Files, but the differences between them can be spotted from their opening credits sequences. Rockford spends a lot of time doing what appear to be chores, hitting the streets, going to jail, looking through binoculars, and buying overpriced groceries during a period of heavy inflation. His one recreation appears to be fishing with Rocky. Magnum drives a Ferrari, rides around in helicopters, performs athletic feats, and admires the well rounded behinds of the Big Island’s cutest bathers. His only problem appears to be Higgins. While Magnum isn’t as pure and perfect as Tom Selleck’s Lance White character from The Rockford Files, he does seem to fit more comfortably in the wish fulfillment side of the genre than does the big J.R.

Still, into even the poshest life, some rain must fall. In this story, Magnum investigates the death of an old friend who was found dead on a military base, his belly stuffed with cocaine. The Navy says he was smuggling, while Magnum thinks he was murdered. Investigation-fu and car-chase-fu ensue.

The producers were wise to pick Tom Selleck for Magnum. He’s got an ease about him and sense of mischief that makes it hard to stop watching him. Certain actors have the kind of charisma that will allow them to carry any plot, and Selleck is one of them. This is a good thing, because the overall plot of this pilot isn’t particularly inspired stuff.

Pilots serve two functions: introduce the main character relationships, and give the audience a sense of the pace and tone of the shows to come. The pilot does the first job well. Magnums relationships with Higgins, T.C., and Rick are well established. What the show does less well is maintain the momentum of the plot. Magnum’s contact with his antagonists is limited, making it harder to sustain a sense of urgency in the proceedings. (I suspect that Robert Loggia did his role as a favor to someone, because his character is so thinly developed that it seems unworthy of his skill.) The Vietnam flashbacks tend to disrupt the story’s flow. Does the information they convey about the main characters outweigh this tendency? The question is debatable.

Also, the female lead’s character lacks interest and definition. I’m loath to blame actress Pamela Susan Shoop. I don’t think she was given too much to work with besides being told to act upset and emotionally needy, but I couldn’t help but think how much better Lindsay Wagner was at handling a similar, if better-written, role in The Rockford Files.

I also thought the car chases could have been better choreographed. To paraphase Chekhov, any story that shows you a Ferrari in Act I should show the Ferrari doing 150 mph or better by Act V. During the car chase that saw Magnum pursued by two thugs in a junker, I wanted to see that Ferrari fly, but I doubt Magnum got it out of second gear. The chase seemed to move at about half speed, and I wondered why Magnum, rather than doing his clay pigeon impression, didn’t just floor it and vanish. If his pursuers’ Rustoleum-mobile could have done more than 55 mph without the wheels falling off, I’d have eaten my desk.

Also, I did wonder why Robin Masters billets bikini girls at his place when he’s on the other side of the world? I’d understand if they, like Magnum and Higgins, served some function on the estate, but instead they seem to live just to frolic and flirt with Magnum. Does Masters leave them there just for that. If so, Magnum has a real pal there, and it just reminds me how much I could use a rich friend.

I’ll accept any offers.

Any.

Please.

Next Week: China Doll