The Magnum-Ferrari link

According to a slightly troubling report in Entertainment Weekly, CBS is considering a Magnum PI reboot. We have three questions: Why? Will Magnum have a moustache? And will he drive a Ferrari 308?

Much like the dire CHiPs movie from earlier this year, these sort of reboots mess with the childhood memories of a certain vintage of 40-something-year-old. When the original was so good (well okay, in the case of the CHiPsTV series, so bad it was good), why attempt to stuff the lightning back in the bottle a second time?

Originally broadcast in the 1980s, Magnum PI followed the sleuthing fortunes of Hawaiiheadquartered Thomas Magnum, a private eye who also (occasionally) worked as a gardener and “security expert” on a wealthy recluse’s estate.

When not duelling with stuffy property manager, Higgins, Magnum would be solving mysteries that tended to revolve around beautiful women being kidnapped. Unless it was one of the later episodes of course, where things tended to get mired in flashbacks to his tour of duty in Vietnam and strange dream sequences.

In pursuit of the bad guys, Magnum (played by Tom Selleck) got to tool around tropical Honolulu and its environs in a red Ferrari 308.

He occasionally appeared in a Jeep and an Audi but it was the chase scenes involving the Ferrari that fired the imagination.

So, if a Magnum PI reboot was to get the green light, which Ferrari would the show’s namesake drive?

Or, worse still, with product placement in these types of things so lucrative to mainstream carmakers these days, will we see Magnum skidding to a halt outside a bad guy compound in a Kia Stinger or Chevy-badged Commodore?

No, sorry. It has to be a Ferrari 308 or nothing in our minds.