By Chris Ryall
June 24, 2004
Poor Eric Balfour. The guy just deserves better than he’s gotten.
Even if you don’t know the name, if you’ve watched any TV over the past year or two, you’d know the face. Balfour first got noticed as Clare’s drug-taking boyfriend on SIX FEET UNDER. You know, the guy with the little moustache and chin hair that he has in every show he’s in. He exited that show on the lam and ended up working with Jack Bauer on 24. He brawled with Ryan on THE O.C. (and those of us who watch that show with more vigor than we should know that he’s the father of Ryan’s ex, not Ryan himself. But I digress to an embarrassing degree.) Balfour was the only good part of the laughably bad FEARLESS, last season’s WB show that was moved from a fall debut to a mid-season replacement to the boneyard, all without ever once seeing the light of day.
Balfour is back again, the 21st century version of Robert Urich, in HAWAII, a show with great scenery and empty-headed characters.
HAWAII is doing its best to be a tropical version of FASTLANE, a show that couldn’t even work on its own, let alone without being transplanted to the 808 area code. It’s not exactly FASTLANE—HAWAII is, instead of undercover punks, about Hawaii 5.0 beat cops and detectives, trying to solve various crimes like headless bodies being tossed into a volcano (gotta use that Hawaiian location for something, I suppose).
Balfour is one half of the junior-level cops in a station house, sharing space with the senior team of Michael Biehn and Sharif Atkins. Also in the mix is the female cop contingent, Aya Sumika, who teaches Sharif Atkins’ character to swim by way of her Jacuzzi. When they get walked in on by Biehn and a group of cops, she slowly walks past all her co-workers naked and then later says she doesn’t want anything else to do with him. She doesn’t need the complication. Of course, no one asked her to walks slowly naked past her co-workers but…well, logic evidently wilts under that tropical sun.
So the “A” and “B” cop teams hit the island to solve their various crimes. They seem to have a little rivalry, as Balfour wants to prove himself to the veteran detectives. But in the pilot, the cases never overlap or interconnect like you think they will so…well, it’s like two different shows, both equally bad.
Speaking of bad, Michael Biehn evidently treats acting coaches like killer cyborgs from the future and does his best to avoid them. Let’s be honest here. Biehn has been in some great movies: THE TERMINATOR, ALIENS, TOMBSTONE. But he’s just not a good actor. Really—don’t let the movie confuse you with the guy. I really want to like him, but just watching his “he won’t stop. He will never stop!” emoting to Linda Hamilton told me that he wasn’t good in 1984, and hearing him say “you got it, bro” to his black partner on HAWAII tells me that two decades haven’t increased his acting ability. Still, he’s Michael Biehn (even if he now looks more like THE HANDLER’s Joe Pantoliano), so he gets a pass.
Here’s Michael Biehn. Eric Balfour, another likeable guy. Hawaii (even if it is just Oahu). And still…it’s empty. Trite. If you live over on the island, the best thing you can do is get those haolies off your island and get a good show there instead.
(Incidentally, I haven’t watched Fox’s NORTH SHORE at the time I’m writing this, so we’ll soon see if the Hawaiian shows go 0-for-2 this season).
NBC’s HAWAII airs this Fall on Wednesday nights at 8 PM.
Next Week: ABC's LOST
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