Is it a sad commentary on my life that I have watched all five of this season’s episodes of the new Magnum, PI?1 Well, yes, it is, but that’s not what I want to talk about. What I want to talk about is the new series’ attempts to come to grips with racism, which as you may be aware is kind of a thing these days, particularly in Hollywood. And, sure, there’s such a thing as too woke, but there’s also such a thing as sound asleep.
In the premiere episode of the new Magnum, the diversity quota was filled almost entirely by mainland spade “TC” (Stephen Hill), whose massive physical presence and resonance could easily dominate the show if the screenwriters let him, along with what was clearly a last-minute add-on to the original show’s format, Japanese police detective Gordon Katsumoto (Tim Kang), who barely makes an appearance in the proceedings.
A police “buddy” is a very standard plot device for any PI show (the original didn’t have one because dimples), but having a “Katsumoto” on hand does acknowledge the 15% percent of the Hawaiian population that has Japanese ancestry, even though Tim Kang is actually of Korean ancestry (maybe 2% on Hawaii). Koreans are typically not fond of Japanese,2 but a job’s a job, right?
After the first show, someone noticed there were no Hawaiians on a show set in you know, Hawaii, so “Kumu” (Amy Hill)3 was quickly installed on the estate where Magnum lives, the property of legendary and never seen author Robin Masters,4 as “cultural curator” of some as yet unseen collection of artefacts. Hill is actually half Japanese and half European and seems to be recapitulating her “breakout role” as Margaret Cho’s wise-cracking (I’m guessing, because I never saw the show) grandma (“Yung-Hee Kim”) on the 1994 sitcom All American Girl, in which Cho, who is of Korean ancestry, actually played a Korean American, albeit one with a Japanese-European grandmother.
The population of Hawaii who actually are of Hawaiian ancestry is pretty small (Wikipedia says around 80,000), but I bet a few of them are actors. I also don’t know why Hawaiians get only one name. Still, the show’s making an effort, isn’t it? Of sorts?
Well, yeah, but then on the fifth episode, “Sudden Death”, Magnum and TC are helping out a Hawaiian(!)5 kid whose father has been arrested for murder, whom they naturally hide from “Family Services” (damn bureaucrats!) on the estate, entrusting him to the care of the “new Higgins”, classy Brit babe Perdita Weeks while they track down the real murderer. In the course of the kid’s stay he and Higgins play chess, and the kid is feeling pretty despondent, so to cheer him up, Perdita/Higgins explains to him the powers of the “White Knight” (aka Magnum, of course).
Yo, scriptwriter and Hollywood big shot David Fury!6 What about the, you know, fucking Black Knight!
Afterwords
In my review of the original Magnum for the Bright Lights Film Journal I decried, well, lots of things, but among them the rampant odor of colonialism—Hawaiian “society” seemed to be comprised entirely of “old money" whites. The new show’s a step up, but it’s time to get past “white knights,”
- In my defense, I will claim that, since the scripts get sloppier and sloppier as they approach the finish line, I have skipped the last ten minutes or so of every episode but the first. ↩︎
- Neither Japan nor China are very popular with their neighbors. It’s almost as if power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. ↩︎
- Hill was all of 43 when she played Cho’s granny. I wonder what Koreans thought of a Japanese-European’s “Korean accent.” ↩︎
- In the early episodes of the original series, Robin, a clearly Hemingwayesque figure, was voiced by Orson Welles. When Orson died, the bit died too. ↩︎
- Actually, I’m guessing here. The character is named “Makoa Iona” and is played by Zion Junk. ↩︎
- Dunno if Fury is an actual “legend”, but he has been a writer/co-executive producer for such “seminal” shows as Buffy and Lost. ↩︎
