Sexy Tom Selleck still solid as a rock in Jesse Stone movies
He inhabits the shabby, grizzled, troubled mantle of former LAPD detective Jesse Stone easily
This review is sexist and shallow. I was hesitating to be so frank until I was reminded, this week, that millions of people got soppy over Colin Firth in a wet shirt.
When playing Mr Darcy for a BBC adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice the camera lingered on the actor as he emerged from a swim in a lake and sauntered, with a wet shirt clinging to his manly chest, across a lawn. It did as much for me as a clout in the chops with a damp rag.
It reminded me, with relief, we are still allowed a “diet Coke break”. For Gen Z and Millennials – that was an advert for fizzy pop when women raced to the window to savour watching construction workers, stripped to the waist, taking a breather and sipping a can of Coke.
Spoiler alert – that lake scene is not in the book: but that’s a whole different column of not letting accuracy get in the way of an awful adaptation. The shirt sold at auction for £20,000.
Which brings me to Jesse Stone. There are nine TV films faithfully based on the novels of Robert B Parker. I know that – not because I Googled it – I’ve read them.
I watch the films – often screened back to back on 5USA – because Tom Selleck is in them. In middle age – his and mine – he’s gorgeous – chunky, greying and sporting a moustache coiffured to with an inch of its life.
He inhabits the shabby, grizzled, troubled mantle of former LAPD detective Jesse Stone easily – without a trace of Magnum PI which I cannot abide. He’s too sexy for his shirt in that and the shortest of shorts are off-putting.
The premise – Stone makes the journey from Los Angeles – after being forced to resign from his role as a homicide detective for drinking while on duty – to Paradise, a small town on the Massachusetts coast.
He is hired as Paradise’s chief of police. The films are all deftly plotted, slow, complicated, complex and all have the steadfast, diligent, moral Selleck’s Stone at their core.
He is strong and comforting and with him in charge you know the case is going to be solved.
The other side of Stone is dark and damaged. He is obsessed with his beautiful ex-wife Jennifer. He sees a therapist – William Devane – to whom he pours out his heart with the same regularity he pours himself large measures of scotch.
Stone is a man alone. Apart from Reggie, a golden retriever, he adopts and wears the same hang-dog expression as Jesse.
The setting is a character in its own right and Paradise is ironically named. It is anything but an Eden. There’s murder, rape and corruption to deal with.
On the same channel – 5USA – one late night I chanced on Blue Bloods – a series about a cop family in New York. Now in its 14th series, Selleck plays Frank Reagan – the head of the family and the New York Police Department Police Commissioner.
Though surrounded by a family he loves, Frank, like Jesse, is a man alone. He has a tough job, often making decisions that clash with his family life – and mourns his late wife. He still wears his wedding ring.
It is Selleck’s solid and serious presence and performance that gives the series – part police procedural and part moral dilemma and politics – gravitas and, for me, makes it unmissable.