Seasons 1-4 are Superior to Seasons 5-8

[marlboro]

Exactly, I could not agree more. Just look at this years biggest show, breaking bad. I can't stand TV and movies indirectly glorifying loser criminals taking the easy way. I always want these charters to fail and to experience justice for their crimes.

SPOILERS

Walt pays for his crimes in the end. He spent the entire series lying to himself that he was doing his criminal acts to help his family after he was gone. In the end, he admitted that he had done it all for himself. He said that he had lived his entire life without ever having lived. Ironically, finding out he was doomed to die of terminal cancer was the impetus for his "rebirth."

Walt, like people in real life, had both good and bad qualities. He was a murderer, a liar, and a manipulator - but he was also brilliant, loyal, and loved his family.


Or, as Magnum put it in "One Picture is Worth":

"There's something I've noticed over the years about movie bad guys. They're always bad; the henchman, the hitmen, the big bosses. They all have that "one dimensional evil". We don't like to think about the fact that they might have families, or about what their families have to go through because of them. I could see that Jack Wilkins was just that scary enigma and I was counting on the possibility that he would have the same universal household problems we all have."


I think there is a difference between glorifying villains and having complex villains who have some sympathetic qualities. If a villain could never be a story's protagonist, we wouldn't have Macbeth or Paradise Lost.

[Little Garwood]

I'm essentially copying and pasting my post from an earlier thread with a similar subject: the Which Seasons Do You Prefer? Thread:

"I was in the fifth grade when I "discovered" MPI during its original run and it's those first four seasons I still like best. It's a lot more hit and miss after that, whether it was "bringing back" Mac, Higgins "maybe" being Robin Masters, literally going back to Viet Nam--a popular theme in the mid-eighties as we came to terms with the war--Magnum's "little voice" becoming more like psychic powers, the Murder, She Wrote intrusion, the overly-serious season eight where I sometimes felt I didn't know the characters anymore, the Miami Vice-ification, etc.

However, I'm not surprised that the top forty eps here includes a lot of latter-season shows. The show definitely matured, but I always like a show earlier in its run than later."

[BWheelz54]

My wife tells me I like Magnum, PI so much because I am such an Indiana Jones nut. I laughed her thought off at first. But the more I got to thinking about it, it made sense to me, and I think it ties into why the first three seasons, especially, rise so high above the rest. I feel I see the adventure influences on Bellisario's earlier episodes. Magnum PI is a kinda bridge that brings that roaring age of 30s adventure into the 80s. Higgins is crucial in the sense that his stories of his old adventures fill that gap through the world war and into the end of the 20th century. I think there was a nod to that in season three's "Flashback," and a nod to that age in so many occasions when Magnum references Hammet or the Maltese Falcon. I think we're supposed to feel that nod that direction. And that sense of roaring "Indiana Jones Adventure" is just gone in the last several seasons. Seems to me the show became something else, and likely a result of Bellasario handing the reigns over.

I find it interesting that Bellasario tried to mine that roaring age much, much more obviously with "Tales of the Gold Monkey," which didn't make a second year. I liked it, but if I put on my objective, critical, thinking cap, I have to admit that "Tales of the Gold Monkey" really isn't written very well at all. But I just so like that era of adventure, which I think defined a young Higgins character, so that the older Higgins character plays off it so well with Magnum, who I always felt inherited Higgins' place as the dashing adventurer. I wonder if that is a strange way to look at it?

But I think that is why my wife says I like Magnum so much because it was the closest thing to Indiana Jones on television. Funny thinking how those two stories intertwine together in so many funny ways.

[Lindsay Writer]

Most shows have their best seasons in their 2nd and 3rd years, sometimes their 4th year, then the show goes downhill and they get progressively worse the longer it stays on. There are exceptions like Breaking Bad which kept getting better but that was a cable series and they only did 13 episodes a season.

For a network drama series where they do 22 or 24 episodes a year, the majority of shows peak in seasons 2 and 3. 4th and 5th seasons are not as good, then 6th and 7th are usually very bad compared to the early seasons. When Bellisario left Magnum in 1984 or 1985 the quality went way down very fast.

"24" had its best seasons its 2nd and 3rd year. 4th and 5th years were also good then it went into soap opera land and it didn't return to its past glory until this past summer. 24 - Live Another Day was really good because they only did 12 hours and it was excellent very fast paced.