Hawaii Five-0 Boss Addresses That Big Problem With the Magnum Crossover

Matt Webb Mitovich

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For as long as there have been rumblings of CBS’ Hawaii Five-0 staging a full-on crossover with sister series Magnum P.I., fans with good memories have been quick to note one very big problem with that idea.

The proverbial fly in the poi? At the close of the Season 3 Five-0 episode “Hoa Pili,” as Kamekona gave Steve, Danny and Max a helicopter tour of their island home, Max likened the scenario to the 1980s TV show Magnum, P.I., even assigning some of his friends their Magnum counterparts. What’s more, “They started singing the Magnum theme, there in the helicopter,” notes Peter M. Lenkov, the showrunner for both of the Aloha State-based dramas.

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The issue was arguably easier to ignore as Five-0 side characters popped up here and there on Magnum. But once you have Steve and Danny actually interacting with flesh-and-blood private eye Thomas Magnum, it is a very different ball of wax.

“We did do that,” Lenkov affirms. And now that his Five-0 and Magnum will actually cross over — in back-to-back episodes airing Friday, Jan. 3 (and detailed here) — “We’re going to forget that episode happened,” he says with a wink.

Reflecting on the March 2013 Five-0 episode that would years later come back to haunt him (or at least raise the hackles of continuity-obsessed viewers), Lenkov says, “That was at a time when I had lost hope that I could get [my Magnum reboot] launched. I had been trying to do it for so long, I thought there was just no way it was going to happen, so I did a little tribute in that episode.

“But we’ll take that one out of rotation,” he jokes, “now that you’ve brought it up!”

Watch McDanno & Co. jam to the Magnum, P.I. theme in Season 3’s “Hoa Pili”:

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