‘Hawaii Five-0’ season 7: Series boss on that surprise cameo

The premiere of “Hawaii Five-0” on Friday night contained a few big events, but there certainly was not a bigger surprise on the show than the one that took place regarding Jack Lord. The original McGarrett from the show many years ago passed away back before “Hawaii Five-0” 2.0 even came to fruition, so the producers did everything that they could in order to make sure that they could get an accurate version of the character to converse with their McGarrett.

In speaking about how this idea originally came about, executive producer Peter M. Lenkov told the following to Entertainment Weekly:

“I originally conceived of the idea — a scene between McGarrett and Jack Lord — to be the final scene in the series, but realized last year that the end was nowhere near and if I wanted to be the first to do something like this, I better commit soon … Thankfully, the conversation between the two men fit perfectly with the theme of season 7.”

Lenkov made it clear that they had permission from Lord’s estate to use his likeness, and from there they worked with CGI artists and body doubles to try to make the scene accurately work. It was certainly a cool idea, and on an emotional level, we feel like it succeeded. However, at the same exact time there was enough of a visual discrepancy that we’d say it was fairly obvious that this was a CGI character in the room, and it was slightly distracting to what was going on. We admire the show for the effort, but ultimately this issue is probably just due to the fact that they’ve only got so much money to work with.

You can read more about the premiere episode by heading over to this link now. Meanwhile, sign up over at the link here to secure some other TV news on everything we cover at CarterMatt via our official CarterMatt Newsletter. (Photo: CBS.)