Back in 2006, I commented on
Hawaii Five-0 and Indians. How does the remake now airing on CBS compare to the original? Here's one take on it:
Wipeout!: The Racialicious Review of Hawaii Five-O 1.1My thoughts:
Daniel Dae Kim and Grace Park are Korean, so they're playing Chinese cousins? It does not compute.
Park is there mostly for cheesecake factor, so far. The original barely had any women in it...so now we have a pretty young thing in a bikini and underwear? What progress!
No Native Hawaiians. And no other significant Asians. (The governor could've been Asian.)
Two white guys dominate, as before. I understand someone named Steve McGarrett probably has an Irish background, but why not make this version half Asian? Why not make Danno Williams an Asian, a woman, or both?
Unlike the new Chin Ho Kelly and Kono, the old ones weren't Hollywood young and beautiful. On TV, it seems there are no police officers over 35. And using two Koreans in place of a Chinese and a Native Hawaiian is unfortunate. The latter ethnicities are more common in Hawaii.
The white McGarrett utters a line in Chinese, while the Korean Chin Ho utters a line in Hawaiian. Nice try at multiculturalism, but it would've been better to have people of those ethnicities uttering the lines.
Therefore, I'd say the old show was cast better than the new show. Forty years after the fact, that's ridiculous.
As for the show itself, the look and feel was an homage to the old series. But the old series put us into the shoes of ordinary Hawaiians and gave us clever detective stories to puzzle out. This show was mostly chases, gunfights, and explosions. The only thing that saved it was the banter between McGarrett and Williams.
I'd give it a grade of "B." I'll keep watching for now, but the original was better.
For more on the subject, see TV Shows Featuring Indians.
Below: Grace Park shows what she brings to the Hawaii Five-0 team.
I tuned in to see if they messed with the theme song. No they did not.
ReplyDeleteThen I stayed around to watch the Oahu valley terrorist fight scene, which had an unreal CGI glow to it. Did someone splice their Medal of Honor machinima clips into the show or something? When the battle was over, I turned it off. The white guys are rather generic and uninteresting. Jin and Sharon "Boomer" had not even come on the screen. I'd watch the show for them alone, based on their excellent presence in "Lost" and "Battlestar: Galactica".