Wilson_MacLeish wrote: ↑Fri Dec 29, 2023 7:45 pm
charybdis1966 wrote: ↑Wed Mar 16, 2022 11:15 am
I saw this last night and noticed on this thread that I gave it my worst score ever (6 - pretty bad) when I re-watched this 10 years ago but I didn't comment, so I'll remedy that now:
I hate everything about the Carol Baldwin character ! From her relentless lies/manipulation to her fake "drunk acting", her ridiculous greying poodle hair and her justification of her behaviour when her lies were discovered with TM does the same.
This reminds me why I detest any episode with her in it so much.
Now I feel better for having got that off my chest.
Well said. I feel the same way myself! The Carol Baldwin character was a big detriment to the show. If you watch Selleck's appearances on David Letterman from that era, he always makes self-deprecating jokes about "when Magnum was hot" and about how Cosby is beating them, etc. It's frustrating that they never thought about going back to what worked so well in the first 3 seasons, or that newer additions like the Carol Baldwin character were turning people off instead of expanding their audience. Magnum was far more beloved for episodes like 'No Need To Know' or 'J. Digger Doyle' (if you want strong female characters) than for episodes like 'No More Mr. Nice Guy'.
To start, I’m not a big fan of the episode either, but it didn’t turn me off completely to the Carol character. TM used all his friends incredibly often so he seemed to get a little comeuppance in this one, I suppose. I also recall reading when the show was still on the air that Bellisario and the other producers made a conscious decision to add in regular female characters. Even before Cosby, according the Neilson data, they were losing the female viewers by the second season. Watching just to see Selleck with his shirt off wasn’t holding on to the female demographic. So I understand their decision making even if we don’t all agree with it. This was an era of just three networks and mass appeal was king. There weren’t all the niche show choices we have now. By the way, my favorite season is the first, hands down.
I also think it’s really hard to keep a TV series with that many episodes per season fresh and interesting. Many dramas today don’t come close to 22 episodes per season. Just a little more than a decade before MPI debuted, the network standard was 26. That was on a typical 7 day shooting schedule per episode. It was part of Selleck’s initial decision to leave. Being the lead, he was working 70-80 hours a week for seven years. He only agreed to a shortened season eight and the network jumped at it.
I would also add, that I often see comments about “the writers” on the show. It’s important to remember that at that time, and with that pace of shooting, there wasn’t a set of writers like a comedy show typically has and many dramas have today. There were dozens of writers for the show over the years. Many episodes were written by a writer who had no other writing credit on the show. This is how it was done to keep the pace of shooting necessary. These spec scripts were submitted and polished up to provide some sense of continuity based on the series “bible”. There’s a thread somewhere here about the number of writers. Younger viewers, used to modern cohesive story arcs, are often not aware that this was the standard for the era and it produced very different results.
Edit:
I revisited the writing credits on IMDB. There are 63 different contributors to the series’ 158 episodes, so those are “the writers”. Further, there are only six who contributed to 10 or more episodes, and that’s really just five because Glen Larson is one of them. He never wrote a single episode. He got that credit because he was part of creating the series. Here’s the really important number that I was describing above. Fully 39 people had just one writing credit! That interestingly, includes Selleck and Mosley who wrote one each, the fantastic series “final” from season 7 by Selleck, and Missing Melody by Mosley. Bellisario’s wife Deborah Pratt wrote two episodes. If you’re a credit watcher, as I am, many of the other names on the list are familiar to me because they were Hollywood writers of the era who contributed to many series over the years.
Not to go too off topic, but the same is true for the directors of the series, as was the norm back then. There are 47 different directors with just four doing 10 or more and 19 directing just one.