HAWAII FIVE-0 MISFIRES WITH MCGARRETT CAMARO
By Cammie
It didn’t take long for CBS’s new HAWAII FIVE-0 to "jump the shark."

To be fair, I joined "Five-0" in progress. The bureaucratic British Broadcasting Company’s BBC America has finally seen fit to allow us "Yanks" to see "Top Gear" in its original sixty-minutes of glory (eighty minutes when all of the American advertising and BBC America promos are added in). That meant I didn’t "surf" in to CBS until twenty minutes past the hour.

And now I wished I hadn’t.

The new Steve McGarrett (Alex O'Loughlin) may not own a suit and subscribes to the plan for shaving twice-a-week, whether he needs it or not. And he apparently learned the Bill of Rights, interrogation techniques, and police procedure from Mark Furman and Jack Bauer.

But what’s really bad is that the scruffy "McGarrett lite" drives a CHEVROLET CAMARO.

A CAMARO?

Yep. In a triumph of product placement over tradition and good taste, the "rebooters" have shoveled the latter-day Five-0 boss into the cartoonish new "Government Motors" Camaro.

And according to the bow-tie wonks who actually care about new Camaros, it’s a V6 . . . .

Now the new McGarrett has fully joined the "metrosexual" ranks of such sloppy wimps as NASCAR’s Jimmy Johnson, Jeff Gordon, and your local methamphetamine dealer. Who knows? Maybe next week they’ll show the new McGarrett’s pad (which, because he’s a Camaro driver, is probably a decrepit mobile home).




And it’s a good thing that Chin Ho (Daniel Dae Kim) is pocket-sized, because they crammed him in the back of the claustrophobic Chevy coupe for a good part of the shark-jumping second episode.

(If the "rebooters" ever decide to reshoot the classic "Hawaii Five-O" episode "Cocoon",
they can just have Wo Fat trap the new McGarrett in the back seat of his car to save on production costs! No need for a sensory deprivation chamber . . . .)

Mercury may have been killed, but that’s no excuse for McGarrett to completely change teams.

Next week? Maybe I’ll just watch the "Top Gear" encore . . . .