Hawaii Five-0's Peter Lenkov discusses wrapping up 10 season and informing the cast of cancelation while shooting the final episode

Entertainment Weekly

Lenkov says he informed the cast of the cancelation while filming a pivotal scene in Friday's series finale. "Well, truthfully, I think the show is going to end every year. So every year you have to think about that," he says. "But I felt like the ending that you saw could have worked as a season finale or a series finale...I always thought that the season would end this way, and then when it became a series-ender I went in and retooled some things so it felt like a real, genuine end." Lenkov adds: "There were two things that were essential to whenever the series was going to end that I needed to put in there. One was, what was in the tackle box? And what was in the box was Steve's father, John, actually suspected that his wife was alive and was investigating that. The other was what for years I called my Pearl Harbor scene, which was, what happened in the hours and days before the attack on Pearl Harbor? I always wanted to see what went into the planning of the Hesse extraction in the pilot and seeing Steve McGarrett as a Navy SEAL before any of this ever happened, before his father was murdered. The idea of seeing the planning stages from the pilot was something that I always wanted to write at some point, and I always knew it was going to be a part of the finale."

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• Lenkov admits some Hawaii Five-0 fans probably didn't like the ending: "Look, here’s the thing: I know the characters best, in my opinion," he says. "I know people will say 'Well, I watched the show for 248 hours, I know them. But I write them, so I know them pretty well.
• Lenkov says he's grateful Hawaii Five-0 lasted 10 seasons because reboots rarely succeed: "For me, first of all, and I tell people this all the time, I don’t think I’ll have a better experience than I’ve had on this show in terms of sort of like the casting magic that we had, location, just everything, the support of the community," he says. "I don’t know if I’ll ever have that again. I’m seeing a lot of it sort of repeat itself with Magnum P.I. in Hawaii. Reboots, historically, they don’t last long and I think we got real lucky because I think we really kept well and we’re in probably the best location you can have for a television show. Those two ingredients probably really are the reason that we’re successful. But yeah, even people come to reboots with very skeptical, but I feel like we took the themes and spirit of the original and did something fresh with it. We honored the original and I think people saw that as not just a rehash of something, but an expansion on the brand and for some reason, 240 hours later, people are still fond of it. We’re lucky."