If there's one thing that the new Magnum PI has going against it, its the confidence of production (and presumably the same crew) of its sister show, the revived Hawaii Five-0, than a show that just started.
This is the new Magnum PI, a largely uninteresting remake of the Tom Selleck series from the 1980s, produced by Eric Guggenheim & Peter M. Lenkov. Jay Hernandez stars as the new Thomas Magnum and he's a perfectly okay facsimile, charming in a oily-millionaire sense with none of the Selleck's grounding of the character.
The old Magnum show was cheesy in hindsight and marked by the then topical social concerns and taboos of the day, but it was compelling because it had veteran professionals like Selleck and John Hillerman to lend film credibility.
The stories and backstories are generic, but the new iteration of Magnum has the dubious distinction of at least some superior qualities going for it. Firstly, the new pilot has a better sense of pacing than the first Magnum PI pilot did in 1980, where the former's sense of pace is horribly laborious and "surprises" were anything but.
Magnum's support team of Zachary Knighton, Stephen Hill, and Perdita Weeks are perfectly fine, in respects better acted, as the sexy modern recasts of the characters from the original.
But, the show cannot escape the feeling that you're watching a re-jigged episode of Hawaii Five-0. And it's dreadfully unengaging.
Everything from the tone, its pace, the style of acting all reek of its parent show - and to be perfectly honest, as the show enters its ninth year of existence, it's an intellectually deadening show.
Watching both of those in the same week can lead to brain damage.