Hawaii Five-0 serves up a Buffett

Crooner Jimmy Buffett - Warren wasn't available - appears as helicopter jock Frank Barma, a friend and contemporary of oldschool He Man war hero Joe White (Terry O'Quinn, who once starred in a really good series called Lost). Parrotheads, as Buffett's devoted base of fans call themselves, will be delighted.

White is called in to help Five-0 during a mission in North Korea, where Mc-Garrett (Alex O'Loughlin) has got himself into a bit of a pickle. Buffett takes to his Five-0 role like a fish to water and by the time the hour is over, the North Koreans will no doubt prove no match for the greyhaired geezers with their spiffy whirlybird flying machines.

It's rote, conventional TV stuff, and if recent numbers hold up - there's no reason to believe they won't - more than 1.7 million viewers will tune in. Hawaii Five-0, in just its second season, is firmly in the Top 20 in Canada.

Hawaii Five-0 has a lot to answer for. The remake of the astonishingly popular original, which ran for 12 seasons between 1968 and 1980, has made waves of its own, and now looks like a safe bet to make it to a third season, and possibly beyond. Its success spawned a run of tepid, hollow remakes - or "reimaginings," as TV executives prefer to call them - from the cancelled Charlie's Angels and Prime Suspect to, next season, remakes of The Rifleman and The Munsters.

The new Five-0 shares the original's eye-filling tropical locations, but the similarities end there. The stories have been updated to modern times and modern sensibilities, and they're interchangeable with any number of TV procedurals. It's as if the story you saw last week on CSI is going to be next week's story on Hawaii Five-0. As the nominal hero, O'Loughlin - a decent actor - is a bit flat and awkward in the role, almost as if he was miscast.

Tonight's episode has more than just Buffett to recommend it, for fans of the series - both the new one, and the original. Larisa Oleynik, Reiko Aylesworth, Doug Mossman and Mark Dacascos, as recurring villain Wo Fat, make guest appearances. Hawaii Five-0 devotee Mike Quigley, who runs the Hawaii Five-0 home page (http: //www. mjq.net/fiveo) out of Vancouver, notes that Mossman was a regular in the original series. While he was never a member of the official Five-0 team, Mossman played the recurring role of police office Frank Kamana - though in tonight's episode, according to Quigley, "He'll probably be in one of those don'tblink-or-you'll-miss-him moments."

Either way, tonight's Hawaii Five-0 promises to weigh in at the high end of the middling Five-0 scale. Jimmy Buffett. Wo Fat. And Frank Kamana. Tonight. Be there. Aloha. (Global, CBS, 10 p.m.)


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