Hawaii Five-O: The Greatest TV Police Show Ever Made

For starters, the setting was great. Each sixty-minute show was filmed on location on the island of Oahu. For people who had never visited Hawaii, and for those who had been there (like me), it was special to see the beautiful scenery week after week as each exciting plot unfolded.

A second factor was the plot lines. There was a lot of drama and the bad guys were, well, really bad. The Hawaii Five-O police force had detectives of Hawaiian origin, a fact that added an air of authenticity to each show.

And then there was McGarrett. Portrayed by actor Jack Lord (he had a role in the first James Bond movie as an American CIA agent) McGarrett, Steve McGarrett was actually the head of the local police department and the protagonist of the show. In his role as the “main good guy,” Jack Lord was intense and dynamic. In fact, he played the part of him so well that many viewers began to strongly associate him with the character he was playing and forgot that he “was just acting.”

Interestingly, the cast of this outstanding show enjoyed one of the great benefits that television actors are given. In addition to being generously paid for each episode, the artists worked and lived in a true tropical paradise.

The show was set during the height of the “Cold War” and one of the recurring “bad guy” characters was a sinister Chinese agent working for “The People’s Republic of China” who McGarrett was never able to capture.

Other antagonists were also evil and despicable, and McGarrett, along with his Hawaiian detectives, would fan out across the island (offering plenty of fantastic scenery) in an attempt to corner and catch the bad guy.

There have been many, many other “cop” shows over the years, some of which have been top notch. But, in my opinion, Hawaii Five-O was, and is, the best television police show of all time. Now, if my programming provider found a way to get these amazing shows back, I’d become a very happy subscriber.

In fact, I’m not sure if there were ever reruns of Hawaii Five-O. If that’s the case, now is the time to “fix this bug”!