Hawaii Five-O

My second TV review. I decided to watch the pilot of Hawaii Five-O. Anybody care to guess why? Anyway, here’s my review. The story was non-existent: crime solved in two clues, bad guy found with little effort except a gun battle and car chase, bad guy dispatched in a fist fight and another gun fight. The rest of the story centered on McGarrett ridiculously being named to head a secret above-the-law paramilitary police unit, then equally ridiculously assembling his team. The banter between McGarrett and Danno was cute. The characters are cardboard (see previous post), except Danno, who is actually sympathetic. He’s a New Jersey cop who follows his ex-wife to Hawaii when she moves there with their daughter. The build-up to - and delivery of - McGarrett’s famous “Book him, Danno” was painful. At the end, the team is relaxing with some beers, and trying to come up with a name for their new team. It’ll probably be a hit.

The Event

It was advertised that The Event was a fix for LOSTies undergoing withdrawal. So, of course I gave it a try. Sadly, predictably, it wasn’t even close. In a supposed tip of the hat to LOST, the story was set up in fits and starts. After the initial scene, they backed up and told the precursor story starting some minutes earlier. Then they did it again, backing up several days, then again, months. The pacing was frenetic, the story wildly confusing, until the end, when it made semi-sense. Of course, there were huge mysterious holes, to be filled in coming weeks, presumably. It was sort of irritating, but the worst part was the lack of character development. The beauty of the LOST pilot was the ingenious way it presented a few of the mysteries of the island in short intense scenes, almost as side events. They introduced the characters in such a way that we loved them or hated them but we cared about them, while hinting at their interesting back stories. Unfortunately, The Event did exactly the opposite, using cardboard characters to introduce a full-blown apocalyptic mystery in a choppy narrative style. I predict this will last about as long as Flashforward did.
I’ll probably tune in next week anyway.