How I Spent the Summer with Tom Selleck

Well, not the whole summer.  At least not yet, anyway.

When I first retired, one of my principles of good living was that I would not watch television unless a program was on that I really wanted to see so that I didn't spend endless hours staring at the big light in the family room just because I had nothing better to do.  It's come to my attention that many hours of programming involving Tom Selleck are broadcast every week, and I really want to see all of them. 

This began early in the summer when COZI TV started a special on Thursday nights for a month that involved four straight hours of Magnum, P.I.  Hawaii is beautiful at that time of the year.  I definitely wanted to watch it.  After the special showing of Magnum, P.I. was finished, it continued every Thursday evening, and I also found that every evening at 8:00 p.m., the show was also aired on Encore television.  That made nine hours of Thomas Magnum available every week.

I take a (mostly) daily walk after lunch, and one day I looked for something to watch on television after my walk.  If I couldn't find something to watch, I was going to be forced to take a nap.  A scan through the channels at 2:00 p.m. found Thomas Magnum was indeed additionally available on COZI TV at that time.  Each day.  Add five more hours of Tom Selleck to my week.

 Although we've always been faithful viewers of Magnum, I've found several episodes that I don't remember ever seeing.  They were from 1985, and I realized that these were the episodes that aired when my daughter was born.  We only had one television at the time, and it was downstairs in the family room where I did not go for several weeks until I recovered from the C-section.  Not to mention that I had the distraction of a newborn that severely interfered with any personal interests during those weeks. 

While I had occasionally watched Blue Bloods on CBS on Friday nights, it wasn't a regular in my schedule.  Why not, I thought, catch a glimpse of Tom Selleck as a mature man?  So I started watching Blue Bloods on Friday nights.  It's a pretty good show.  Quite dramatic and intense, but it's good for that type of show.  "Please don't kill my family" sent a message for the police officer's children who were in trouble at the hands of bad people.

Early in the summer I ran across a Sunday afternoon of the Jesse Stone movies on the Hallmark Movie Channel.  They gave a glimpse into the dark side of Tom Selleck: conflicted, brooding, drunken, yet somehow morally upright, Jesse Stone.

Now, as if this wasn't enough, my husband started watching a movie on Saturday afternoon and proceeded to complete watching it with the rest of the family later that evening.  It was one of those movies, he said, that he always watches whenever he finds it on TV.  Quigley, Quigley, Quigley.  He couldn't stop talking about it, and he showed me how to find it on XFinity On Demand.  The movie?  Quigley Down Under.  So this afternoon when there was absolutely nothing else to do, I flipped over to On Demand and watched Mr. Quigley, played by Tom Selleck.  Yes.  It was a great movie.
 
I've become knowledgeable about everything Tom Selleck.  I can pick out the two Magnum episodes that feature his real-life wife.  I now know that Magnum's birthday is August 8 and his favorite cowboy is Roy Rogers.  I see in his work the recurring theme of "cowboy", even in Hawaii, and the attention paid to the Vietnam veteran and the problems they experienced after the war.  I can almost date the show based on his hair cut.  

I realize that my fascination with Tom Selleck can't go on forever.  It doesn't need to.  The summer is about half over and will soon fade to its end.  It certainly has been full of Tom Selleck, probably more because of the large body of work he's produced rather than my inability to pass up any movie or television show that features him.  Here's to good times, here's to summer,  laissez les bons temps rouler!