Thank you all for replying. I meant to respond to this thread sooner, but I got bogged down with other stuff and the FB Hawaii Five-O groups. What I never could understand is what did people want from Jack Lord in general. It seems that no matter what he did, people found something to criticize. If he was serious, stern, stoic, and reserved, they called him wooden and stiff. If he shows emotions - either sadness, anger, passion, contempt, abrasiveness, etc. - they say he's chewing the scenery. Which way do they want it?

Then they complain that the story lines revolved around Jack. Jack didn't write the scripts, and he didn't tell the writers what to write. He played the lead investigator, so he would get to do more in the story line. However, he still didn't get the majority of screen time in every episode, unless the crime of the week involved McGarrett personally.

Another criticism people made of Jack was that he was too preachy. It looks like people can't separate the actor from the character. It wasn't Jack who was being preachy. He was playing Steve McGarrett, a fictional character, and the lines he said were written for him by other writers, so it was their words he was saying. Even then, he wasn't preaching. Between all of us, we have seen every episode at least once and as much as much 5 times or more. Was McGarrett preaching in all or some of them? No. I only remember him preaching in that Season 12 episode about the gun, but it needed to be done. Some might think his lecture to the father in The Computer Killer was preaching, but it was two sentences he said about how machines can compute information, but we expect more from people, and the father hired the killer, so he needed more than a lecture. It seems people forget that the people on the receiving end of those lectures were criminals - murders, con artists, kidnappers, etc. Do they expect him to kind to them?