Hawaii Five-O

Brian Faucette

• Publisher: Wayne State University Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780814344330
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Television History & Criticism

Hawaii Five-O, created by Leonard Freeman in 1968, is an American police procedural drama series that was produced by CBS Productions and aired for twelve seasons. Author Brian Faucette discusses the show's importance by looking at how it framed questions around the security and economy of the Hawaiian Islands in connection with law enforcement, the diversity of its population, the presence of the US military, and the influx of tourists. Faucette begins by discussing how the show both conformed to and adapted within the TV landscape of the late 1960s and how those changes helped to make it the longest-running cop show in American TV history until it was surpassed by Law and Order. Faucette argues that it was Freeman's commitment to filming on location in Hawaii that ensured the show would tackle issues pertinent to the islands and reflect the diversity of its people, culture, and experiences, while helping to establish a viable film and TV industry in Hawaii, which is still in use today. Faucette explains how a dedication to placing the show in political and social context of the late 1960s and 1970s (i.e., questions around policing, Nixon's call for "law and order, " the US military's investment and involvement in the Vietnam War, issues of racial equality) rooted it in reality and sparked conversation around these issues. Another key element of the show's success is its connection to issues of tourism and the idea that TV can create a form of "tourism" from the safety of the home. Faucette concludes with discussion of how Hawaii Five-O led to the development of other shows, as well as attempts to reboot the show in the 1990s and in 2010. Faucette makes a strong argument for the series as a distinctive artifact of a time in US history that witnessed profound changes in culture, politics, and economics, one that will excite not only scholars and students of television and media studies but any die-hard fan of gripping police procedurals.

1

“I’m Worried about a World without Law and Justice”

Policing the Islands

When Hawaii Five-O debuted in 1968, it was clear that the series intended to be a new type of cop show that was designed to respond to the issues of the day. The protagonist, Steve McGarrett, was the epitome of the United States’ new type of cop and was labeled the “cop who cares.” McGarrett and his team dealt with many of the same issues that the United States faced in the late 1960s: the impacts of the civil rights movement, drugs, violent crime, the counterculture, and Vietnam. Many of these same issues appeared in later seasons of the show, as the issues of the 1960s bled into the 1970s. They were also taken up in the book Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order, which looked at the connection between policing and the media. The book examines how concerns over a series of muggings in the United Kingdom in the early 1970s led to the adoption of the narrative that a “crime wave” had broken out across the country. The authors argue that in responding to these events with words like “crime wave,” the police, courts, and media worked together to create a sense in the country that crime was on the rise and as a result convinced the public that whatever measures the police took were appropriate to deal with the problem. Such a belief that crime was overwhelming society also factored into the development of Hawaii Five-O.

The show was built around the producer Leonard Freeman’s fascination with the idea of “man’s evil amid paradise.” Freeman’s idea was a risky one because by the late 1960s, the cop show had fallen out of favor after its boom in the 1950s, when Dragnet was heralded as the standard-bearer for the genre. Naked City (ABC, 1958–63) replaced Dragnet as a critical favorite. Naked City relied on location shooting and critical investigations into the cops, criminals, and victims, whereas Dragnet (built around its famous commitment to “just the facts”) focused more on procedure rather than the human element. Indeed, Jonathan Nichols-Pethick in his book TV Cops notes that style is a key factor in the genre of the cop show, in conjunction with a desire for realism with regard to story, character, and setting.1 Sue Turnbull in the book TV Crime Drama, like Nichols-Pethick, examines the history of the genre and the series produced in that genre in the context of UK and US crime shows. Such shows, she argues, play a crucial part in making audiences aware of social issues and anxieties and have served to educate and challenge audiences’ knowledge of and understanding of police and policing.2 Again, Turnbull, like other television scholars, omits a reference or discussion of Hawaii Five-O and its connection to the creation and history of the TV cop/crime dramas.

Douglas Snauffer in his book Crime Television focuses on how cop shows offer a snapshot of the TV industry at the time, and while he does include a chapter on Hawaii Five-O, he does not offer a sustained critical analysis of the show, instead focusing more on plot summaries and information about the show’s background and ratings history. It is a model that Karen Rhodes adopts in her book Booking Hawaii Five-O, in which she uses more of a fan approach, with episode guides and some critical analysis, but does not examine the series using a television studies approach.

Executive producer Leonard Freeman on set.

George N. Dove’s The Police Procedural was one of the earliest scholarly explorations of the cop as a cultural figure. In it, he focuses on novels rather than television, but his analysis of the police procedural is useful because many of the same policing and narrative techniques such as interviews of suspects and victims, assessment of evidence, and building of cases that can be found in cop shows including Dragnet and Hawaii Five-O. Dove, using a structuralist approach, breaks down all the methods of policing and technologies used in these novels to illustrate how the procedural serves as an update of classic detective fiction. The tropes discussed were and remain significant components of the cop TV show. While the cop show is most often thought of in relation to its impact on television and television history, the genre did not just emerge on television but was the result of the shifting of successful radio series to television.

Kathleen Battles’s book Calling All Cars offers a cultural and historical analysis of the cop show and its origins in radio drama. She argues that radio cop dramas were designed to showcase the power of police as police forces across the United States became more institutionalized and adopted modern police practices and technologies to better serve the public. The result was a narrative form that “played with radio’s ability to collapse time and space to create the dragnet effect, the cultural construction of police forces as an always available presence that could conquer the problem of criminal mobility,” and all this was achieved, she illustrates, using the intimate address of radio, which like its progeny TV came directly into the home.3 Many of the aspects she discusses about the formation of the genre during the era of radio can be applied to later cop shows like Dragnet, which began on radio and then moved to television, as well as Hawaii Five-O, which was designed solely for television.

Crime shows morphed from a focus on police to a focus on young, urban private investigators, with series like Michael Shayne (NBC, 1960–61), which featured Richard Denning as the title character in the short-lived series. Denning later was cast as the governor in Hawaii Five-O. The networks tried to resurrect the police procedural in the early 1960s with shows like The New Breed (ABC, 1960–61), which starred Leslie Nielsen as the head of elite LAPD officers. 87th Precinct (NBC, 1961–62) followed the personal and professional lives of cops in a dilapidated Manhattan precinct, and The Investigators (CBS, 1961) focused on insurance investigations. Each of these series was unsuccessful at finding an audience, and it seemed that the genre was no longer relevant to US audiences or the industry until 1965.

The F.B.I. (ABC, 1965–74), a series featuring Efrem Zimbalist as Inspector Lewis Erskine, found success in the ratings in 1965, with its stories drawn from the FBI archives and a focus once more on police procedure. CBS responded with its own version of an elite cop unit in 1966, when it launched Mission Impossible (CBS, 1966–73), which offered viewers a mix of the elements popularized with The F.B.I. and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (NBC, 1964–68). The success of these crime dramas led to a rebirth of Dragnet in 1967, this time in color. The same year that Hawaii Five-O appeared in US homes, yet another cop show, The Mod Squad (ABC, 1968–73), found an audience, altering the genre by casting young cops rather than the standard middle-aged men who were the norm in previous series. Nichols-Pethick, in his analysis of contemporary cop series from Hill Street Blues (NBC, 1981–87) to The Wire (HBO, 2002–8), challenges the idea that the police drama or cop show is a genre. Instead, he argues that it is better understood as a formula used by the television industry to ensure comforting narrative patterns for audiences and that for these formulas to be successful, they must explore and depict current political and social issues that are relevant to the moment of broadcast.4 While Nichols-Pethick does not discuss Hawaii Five-O, his ideas about the cop show as a formula can be applied to Hawaii Five-O, the success of which paved the way for future iterations of the cop show that similarly relied on authenticity. The series influence can be felt in shows such as Miami Vice (NBC, 1984–90), CSI (CBS, 2000–15), and NCIS (CBS, 2003–). All are series that make locations such as Miami, Las Vegas, New York, New Orleans, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC, characters in their own right that influence the aesthetics of the series, just as Hawaii Five-O did from its debut in 1968. It was amid a renewed interest in law and order on television in the late 1960s that Freeman began to form the idea for his own unique take on an elite police unit that dealt with crimes at the state level rather than the local one. Although his show was procedural in nature like Dragnet and Naked City, Freeman wanted to use actual locations and native actors for his stories about policing the islands.

Freeman decided to set his new series in Hawai‘i at the urging of his mother-in-law, who lived there. Freeman and his wife, Rose, visited the islands in 1965, and during the visit, he came up with the initial idea for a series called “The Man.”5 Freeman first offered the lead to Richard Boone, the popular western actor best known for the role of Paladin in Have Gun Will Travel (CBS, 1957–63). In 1964, Boone moved to Oahu and recognized the island’s unique potential for television production. Freeman was intrigued by Boone’s insights because he still believed that TV shows had to be shot in Los Angeles or New York. Boone declined Freeman’s offer because he had already pitched and filmed his own pilot for a Hawai‘i-based series called Kona Coast for CBS. CBS passed on Boone’s idea and selected Freeman’s instead, with the caveat that the title of the series be changed to better reflect the importance of location to the series.6 Thus, Freeman’s “The Man” became Hawaii Five-O, in recognition of Hawai‘i being the fiftieth state, and the decision was made to shoot the series there. Until Freeman’s death in 1974, he ensured that the show’s identity remained intact.

Previous shows that had been set in Hawai‘i, such as Adventures in Paradise (ABC, 1959–62) and Hawaiian Eye (ABC, 1959–63), were filmed on soundstages in Los Angeles and used only stock footage of Hawai‘i. Hawaiian Eye, developed by the Warner Bros. television division and the industrialist Henry J. Kaiser, self-promoted Kaiser’s resort, Kaiser Hawaiian Village (today the Hilton Hawaiian Village). Kaiser also sought to capitalize on the demand for advertiser support for 77 Sunset Strip (ABC, 1958–64).7 Freeman’s show more so than other Hawai‘i-set shows offered viewers the chance to fantasize what it might be like to live on the islands and to work in local law enforcement. Indeed, TV critics celebrated the location work, as noted in Variety of October 2, 1968, in which the reviewer writes, “a handsomely produced cop meller enhanced by first rate thesping and the visuals afforded by the islands.”8 The review links the series’s draw to the use of location shooting, while also connecting it to the cop genre, with which audiences were already comfortable.

The series bible, written in 1967, provides the blueprint for the series. It highlights that the “series will be shot entirely on location in Hawaii,” and it advises writers, “if you can’t find it don’t write it!” and “stay loose and let the location spark you!”9 The guidelines ensured a level of consistency in the show and pointed out to potential writers that the only types of stories accepted would be those that reflected the unique nature of Hawai‘ian life and culture. Freeman’s approach for the show was risky because many Americans had no knowledge about Hawai‘i other than what they saw in magazines or travel brochures, and they did not possess knowledge about the diversity of ethnicities and cultures present in the islands. Still, because Hawaii Five-O at its heart was a cop show, it required that the series depict more than just the touristy and luxurious qualities of life on the islands that appealed to white audiences; it also had to represent the seedy underbelly of life in Honolulu, including the poverty and racial conflict that was evident between the haoles (whites and nonnative peoples) and the native Hawai‘ian people. Much as Naked City revealed the myriad stories of the people of New York City and the police work needed to maintain order in the city, Freeman wanted his show to depict the variety of stories, people, and places associated with Hawai‘i and its police apparatus.

Furthermore, the bible strongly urges writers for the show to “tell it like it is” and explains that the “writer dig the local scene because there is no substitute for the on-site research which we are prepared to furnish.”10 Prospective writers are further advised that any of the policing methods depicted in an episode must be in line with actual methods conducted by the police in Hawai‘i. To ensure that the stories presented and scenes depicted accurately reflected actual police policy in Honolulu, the guide suggests that the local police will assist, allowing them to ride in a “squad car on a night beat,” because the series is “striving for truth and the documentary look and feel.”11 This attempt to achieve realism would allow viewers to see Hawai‘i as the nation’s “extended heart beat into the Pacific”: “It is where we meet and touch two of the three billion persons on Earth.”12 It is clear in looking at the series bible that Freeman viewed his demands for authenticity in location and policing techniques as crucial to the series’s DNA. This attention to detail and the intention that his show would only feature stories relevant to the Hawai‘ian experience are admirable. Yet they gloss over the reality that Freem...