It's very simple for me to explain why I'm so happy to follow the revamped "Magnum, P.I." from its old CBS berth to its new digs on NBC Sunday nights.Nobody ever said it was great television. Not the first time with Tom Selleck or this time with Jay Hernandez. Frankly, the major selling point for me is the red Ferrari 488 Spider that Magnum drives around Hawaii as if it were a plain old Honda or Toyota.
I have been a bit of a car nut since I was a toddler. According to family legend, I was, as a 2-year old, able to sit at the living room front window and name the make of every car as it passed on Starin Avenue. I can't say it's personal memory, just family lore. I knew them just by sight, I've been told, even if they were as obscure as Hudsons (which I pronounced "Humson") and Studebakers (which I pronounced "Stupebaker").
It's just something that's always been there. You'd be amazed at the thoroughly lousy TV shows and movies I've sat through just to watch the cars people were driving. My fondness for film noir is, at least in small part, increased by my pleasure in watching all those bullet-nosed 1948 Fords getting our attention at regular intervals.No matter how crummy are the films noirs sometimes shown by TCM's Eddie Muller on weekends, I'll stick with them if there's one of those once-ubiquitous Fords at regular intervals.With "Magnum, P.I.," one of the stars of the series has always been the new red Ferrari convertible the lead actor drives. It has always been one of the more incongruous hilarities of the plot.
On the new transplanted "Magnum" on NBC Sundays there was a juicily idiotic moment where the new, shrunken Magnum (Jay Hernandez) and the new Higgins (Perdita Weeks) did some investigative skulking around the office of a doctor who had just perished because he had driven his car at top speed into a concrete divider.Our gumshoes-in-paradise were trying to rifle his office as unobtrusively as possible. Needless to say, this is a little bit difficult if you've just parked a tomato-red Ferrari convertible at the curb.I looked up the model and year of the car and discovered they currently go for $292,255. How "private" can an investigator be when he's tooling around the highways and byways in a car that costs almost 300 grand and goes from 0 to 60 in three seconds?
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