The post only began to touch on the similarities, but they can quickly come to appear overwhelming. As that post's author noted, both Harm and Magnum are sons and grandsons of naval officers who lost their fathers in a major war (Korea in Magnum's case, Vietnam in Harm's) and whose mothers afterward remarried, giving them an affluent civilian stepfather. However, both those figures followed in the footsteps of the biological fathers whose names they bear and graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy, then went on to join an elite, storied branch of the service (SEALs in Magnum's case, F-14 fighter pilots in Harm's), from which they have since departed for a second career which has them working as investigators, which work--naturally melodramatic and overglamorized, while affording a certain amount of variety (from seedy domestic stuff to paramilitary adventure), and giving them many a chance to play the action hero--is the basis of most of the TV series' episodes. Both are haunted by the ghosts of Vietnam, and especially captivity by the enemy (something Magnum personally experienced, but which in Harm's case was his father's fate), which is to involve them in private attempts to rescue "Missing in Action" personnel they believe to still be held in that country. Both discover long lost half-brothers in the course of their story, whose histories are significantly connected with the same war. Both have a "cool guy" bachelor image of which a flashy sports car is an important part, both are seen wearing Hawaiian shirts and smoking cigars. And both are played by physically similar actors (both Tom Selleck and David James Elliott 6"4, both dark-haired and light-eyed, with Elliott, like Magnum, wearing a moustache when portraying Harm's father).
All of this, of course, is hardly shocking, especially when one remembers that a long creative career usually gets to be that because of a good deal of recycling and reusing one's older ideas. By this time Bellisario had been in Hollywood for about two decades--and his last show, Quantum Leap, had not exactly topped Magnum, which was far and away his biggest hit (and remained so until NCIS exploded in the twenty-first century). It was quite natural that, consciously or unconsciously, he would have served up something so resembling Magnum--though at least two differences seem worth citing. One is the fact that it was not just Magnum being recycled, as becomes obvious when we look at that most critical non-Magnum element, namely its hero's being a flyer. Aviators were, after all, the heroes in that show for which he had written earlier in his career, Black Sheep Squadron, while Bellisario had earlier made Magnum's buddies a pair of ex-Vietnam War Marine helicopter crew (TC and Rick Wright, played by Black Sheep Squadron alum Larry Manetti), and even produced an aviation-themed show of his own in Airwolf--where, it might be added, the hero was always preoccupied with Vietnam MIAs, with the theme linked to a brother who was an army helicopter pilot (in what fairly obviously parallels JAG, where the half-brother whose life story is inextricably linked to the MIA issue is a Russian army helicopter pilot).
While one can read all sorts of personal motivations into that (like a determination to be proved right), I suspect that this at least partly had to do with the difference in premise, and period. It was one thing to present in such a manner a character who was an ex-Navy SEAL living as a "glorified beach bum," especially when glorified beach bumminess was part of the fantasy being presented. (Magnum may not be rich, but residing on the Robin Masters estate in Hawaii, driving a Ferrari, he lives like a king.) It was another to treat serving military officers so lightly, especially in the post-Gulf War '90s, when the attitude toward "reverent disengagement" from military affairs prevailed in American life.
Still, it seems to me that the decision cost the show in hindsight. Magnum's imperfections were important to making the character a relatable, likeable, entertaining "character," with Magnum's more humorous traits contributing greatly to its popularity--while if the '90s saw Americans treating their armed forces more reverentially that attitude was not what they were looking for from their pop culture in that era of snark. And so in the end, rather than becoming a pop cultural phenomenon like Magnum, JAG ended up just something "old people watched." Of course, they did watch it in sufficient numbers to keep it on the air for ten seasons, in the course of which it became the launch pad for an NCIS franchise that, now in its fourth incarnation, has stayed on the air for almost two decades--all of which makes it very far from being a failure.
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