By Elias Nebula

Thursday, April 25, 2013

"Book 'Em, Leland, Murder One."

Dog was on Hawaii 5-0. 

It was purely a sinecure, like most things on TV, but Duane still blundered wherever he feasibly could.


Pure puppy puffery. There being no show left to promote, he was promoting the nebulous brand of Duane Chapman. Life exists henceforth in stolen chances at advertisements. The prologue, never hereafter the denouement.

Now you should know this: the two lead actors in Hawaii 5-0 are almost identical -- one is just a foot shorter than the other one. One of them is the son of James Caan. I saw him once in Joan's on 3rd Street. Both are lantern-jawed sandy-headed dependable, stand-up meathead heartland homeland good-old-boy shitkickers. This must be confusing for viewers I would think. Still, it seems American viewers have voted with their feet and it has been decided that the people must have plenty of sandy-haired, square-jawed, two-fisted cannon-fodder types. File alongside the ubiquitous feisty hispanic female, the corrupt Irish-American uniform cop, and the dogged African-American law official. 

In his scene, it was highly unrealistic because Dog wrestled the poor perp (nearly wrote "poor poop") to the bonnet of a car. When, in the history of the world, has Dog ever directly attacked a perp? He always has Leland do it, while he stands about paring his nails before donning a delightful pair of lace gloves. Remember when Leland punched the shit out of that guy on a motel forecourt?

"We beat you to it for once! Ah-ha!" Dog beamed at the cops, trying to pretend he was breathing easy inside his whalebone girdle. Coughing away a coronary. As his "chestal thorax" goes into "arrest" and he goes through the "seven stages of denial." He made a peevish little allusion to that tried, trite old routine whereby the cops always ruined a perfectly decent episode of Dog the Bounty Hunter by arresting the quarry before Dog's ingenious, intricate plan reached fruition.

I fast-forwarded over this supremely dull programme looking in vain to see where Dog popped up again, but he didn't. It veered next into a storyline about roller-derby MILFS -- and so on. After this, bedlam. The show seemed to be roving all over the place, in fact, in its frantic search for a plot or a way to stop the viewer walking away in boredom. This must explain the very apogee of desperation: having Dog appear on an episode.

This week the guest is Jimmy Buffet.