The iconic 1960s TV series Quentin Tarantino can’t stand: “It sucks”
Since he’s only confirmed that he’ll be washing his hands of directing features whenever he gets around to that increasingly mythical tenth and final movie of his, who’s to say that Quentin Tarantino won’t turn his attentions to television?
He’s already written his first play and picked up his first couple of acting roles in years as he continues to do everything apart from work on the screenplay that will ultimately define his legacy in an almost unwinnable situation of his own making, and the ‘Golden Age’ of small-screen storytelling continues.
The two-time Academy Award winner loved ER and CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, so he stepped in to guest-direct an episode of each, although he didn’t live out his dream of helming an instalment of the Battlestar Galactica reboot. He loved Alias, too, so he popped up in a couple of episodes to deliver one of his trademark terrible acting performances.
Some of Tarantino’s other random favourites include Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom, Mike Flanagan’s The Haunting of Hill House, How I Met Your Mother, and Peppa Pig, which he called one of Britain’s greatest exports of recent times. As you’d expect, though, most of them hail from the 1960s and 1970s.
The Virginian, Star Trek, The Green Hornet, Speed Racer, and The Night Stalker are just some of the shows hailing from those formative decades that hold a special place in the filmmaker’s heart, but that sentiment doesn’t apply to one of the era’s definitive and history-making series, which he can’t stand.
Across 12 seasons and over 280 episodes between 1968 and 1980, Hawaii Five-O became the longest-running procedural in American television history, captivated audiences with its catchy theme tune, embedded itself in popular culture, and spent most of its run as one of the most-watched shows on the box, with viewing figures regularly into the tens of millions per week.
Several attempts were made to bring it to the big screen to capitalise on the trend for turning iconic TV shows into movies, and at one stage, Tarantino was offered the job. “My producing partner at the time, Lawrence Bender, was hanging out with some dude from Fox or Warners or whatever, and they said I should stop working on what I was doing, because I’d be so into this,” he revealed.
Having split from Bender in 2005, this would have definitely been pre-Grindhouse, and with a blockbuster-sized version of Hawaii Five-O reported to have sparked a multi-studio bidding war in 2002, an educated guess would suggest that was around the time when the Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill creator’s interest was gauged.
Not for very long, right enough, since Tarantino couldn’t have made his feelings any clearer. “I tried to watch the old TV show, but it sucks,” he declared. “I don’t even like Hawaii.”
It sounds like a short conversation to say the least, albeit one that put across his thoughts on just how little interest he had in even a hypothetical Five-O flick.
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