Eric Guggenheim talked with TV Guide about the future of the season 5 of Magnum P.I., such as the relationship between the main characters and delving deeper into the past life of Juliet Higgins, including to know more about her mother.
We will unpack more of Higgins' backstory. We're gonna learn more about what her life was like before she got to the island, and we're gonna learn a little bit more about her mom.
During the TCA (Television Critics Association) Press Tour in Pasadena, TV Guide spoke with the producer and showrunner Eric Guggenheim about the decision regarding the romance between Magnum and Higgins, among other news about the TV show, including that they will be showing more about Higgins’ past. Also, we’ll be able to see Kumu and Higgins together again: “we sent Amy’s character on a case with Higgins, so we actually have them teaming up again on a case, and that’s a lot of fun”.
Below are some q&a from the interview:
Tell me about the decision to have Magnum and Higgins become a couple after four seasons. What changed for you guys in the writers’ room?
Eric Guggenheim: It’s funny—the will-they-or-won’t-they question hangs over a lot of shows, and you know the answer to that question [on Magnum P.I.]. Inevitably, they will, so it’s just a question of “when?” and just the journey to get there. And I think if you had asked us in Season 1, “What is the earliest they would have gotten together?” I would have said maybe the end of Season 5, but what happened was the chemistry between Jay and Perdi is just so off the charts, and it was becoming harder and harder to keep them apart, and what I discovered was—and I would talk to Jay about this—we were getting to a point where we were starting to repeat ourselves, where we were doing scenes that were just familiar, and it got to the point where I felt like we were treading water.
And even when you’re working on the show, like in editing, and you’re seeing things that you don’t see on the page, you’re seeing looks between the characters and just how powerful it is, it was just getting harder and harder to keep them apart. That said, before we actually made that decision, it was like, What does this look like? Because we didn’t want to start down a road and not know where we were headed, we talked about the pros and cons about getting together versus keeping them apart a little bit longer, and the more we talked about putting them together and what that would look like, the more excited we got. It took us to some new places; it deepened the relationship between the two of them. We suddenly had so many more ideas than we did, and so it just seemed like the right time.
The existence of the so-called Moonlighting curse might not even exist, but it’s always a conversation that I find writers having when deciding whether to make their two lead characters a couple. How are you trying to depict these early stages of Magnum and Higgins’ relationship in a way that would maintain a lot of the same dynamics of the first four seasons but still feel completely different at the same time? How are you trying to keep that tension between the characters?
Guggenheim: It’s funny you mentioned the Moonlighting curse. [Laughs.] And that show ended for a lot of reasons. It wasn’t so much that they got David [Bruce Willis] and Maddie [Cybill Shepherd] together. [Creator] Glenn Gordon Caron had left the show. He had a star whose feature film career had taken off. There were many reasons why that show ended. I don’t think it ended because they got David and Maddie together.
But that said, one of the key elements of our show is that bickering and that banter. And that doesn’t go away just because they’re together because fundamentally, their personalities are still very different, and their points of view are still very different. Married couples will bicker all the time. In fact, couples that are together tend to bicker more than ones that are just flirting with each other, so it’s all done in the scene work, and the stories just offer opportunities for different points of view. They have different outlooks, so they’ll continue to clash.
In the first episode of Season 5, Higgins notes that she and Magnum haven’t exactly had a conventional courtship, because they’re practically living together before even going on an official first date, but there is the dinner scene in the wine cellar that marks the unofficial start of their courtship. How much of the early stages of their relationship will we see this season?
Guggenheim: They’re certainly going through a growing period. It is a very non-traditional relationship, and we ended up leaning into that and acknowledging that this is not how normal relationships progress, and when we put them together, there’s still inherent risk in them being together. They each acknowledged it at the end of last season, and they discussed it again here. This season, it’s very complicated. Not only are they friends, but they’re also business partners, so the whole situation is fraught. But for us as writers, that’s been a good thing.
To read the full interview, check TV Guide website here.