In Hollywood, the Year of the Hunk

By Gerald Clarke

Tom Selleck leads the prime-time muscle brigade

Fact 1: More women than men watch television's prime-time entertainment shows.

Fact 2: Many women like to see good-looking guys sauntering across the screen, pumping those biceps into little mountains of muscle, working those hairy abdominals into heroic furrows, flexing those pecs and lats until they pop.

Put those two facts together and you have the Year of the Hunk. Charlie's Angels and the other '70s jiggle shows have given way to the '" muscular-ripple shows of the '80s: Magnum, P.I.; Voyagers!; High Performance and The Fall Guy. Nighttime TV resembles nothing so much as the locker room of the local Y, and the ability to read a line is less important than knowing how to use a Nautilus machine. "Young girls don't watch my show to see my wonderful acting," says Jon-Erik Hexum, star of NBC's Voyagers!, with what might be called naked honesty. "The hunk thing is the catalyst that gets them to watch."

In their search for beautiful brawn, casting directors more and more head directly to the chief suppliers of male pulchritude: the modeling agencies. "The big agencies are the screening ground," says Nina Blanchard, who runs her own agency in Los Angeles. "I get six or seven calls a day from casters and producers asking to see our new people. They always want to know the name of the guy on the cover of Gentlemen 's Quarterly."

Good looks have always been at a premium in Hollywood, but in the '70s men who looked odd, unusual or perhaps just real--a bald Telly Savalas or an impish Robin Williams--also achieved TV stardom. "It was the heyday of the average guy," says Joel Thurm, head of talent for NBC. "The country was prosperous. People were relatively satisfied with their lives and were able to laugh at themselves a little more. Now we're looking for heroes again. We want fantasy and glamour."

The man, or hunk, chiefly responsible for the return to glamour is Tom Selleck, the 6-ft. 4-in., 200-lb. star of CBS's Magnum, P. I., which premiered in 1980. A genial shoot-'em-up, Magnum is set in Hawaii, a location that allows Selleck, 38, to romp on the beach and show off his grizzly-bear chest to the camera with once-a-week regularity. No. 2 in the latest Nielsen ratings, the show has apparently propelled Selleck to movie stardom as well. His first feature film, High Road to China, displaced Tootsie as the box-office leader upon its release March 18. A lethargic imitation of Raiders of the Lost Ark, with a wild chase across Asia in '20s biplanes, High Road has little besides Selleck to recommend it. But that is enough for his fans.

When women, who make up 56% of Magnum 's adult audience, began pushing the show up the charts, the network cry went out for more muscle, and producers began asking for "Tom Selleck clones." Where to find them? In the men's fashion magazines and in TV commercials, of course; no one forgot that Selleck became widely known through the commercials for Chaz men's cologne. Dark-haired Jack Scalia, 32, the man who was exposed in the Jordache jeans ads and overexposed in Eminence shorts, was recruited for the short-lived Devlin Connection and then put into ABC's current High Performance. His costar, Rick Edwards, 29, came directly from the December 1981 cover of G.Q. Ted McGinley, 24, modeled for everything from catalogues to Italy's L'Uomo Vogue before he wound up on ABC's Happy Days, Adrian Zmed, 29, did commercials for Thorn McAn shoes and Flair pens before co-starring with William Shatner in ABC's T.J. Hooker, and Peter Barton, 26, was seen parading around in bathing suits in Penthouse mag azine before he became the visitor from a distant planet in NBC's The Powers of Matthew Star. Hexum also appeared in magazine ads before stepping into a TV show, the time-traveling Voyagers!

Some of the former models can actually act. Selleck reminds anyone within earshot that he studied the craft for 15 years. On-camera, he has the charm and unthreatening masculinity of a slightly more serious Burt Reynolds. Others are getting on-the-job training. "I try as hard as I can, but I see where I need improvement," says Barton. Still others, like the wooden Scalia, appear to have graduated from the Ali MacGraw School of Thespian Arts. "I would have preferred it if Scalia had had some acting experience," admits Thurm, who brought him into television. "But we weren't asking him to play King Lear." Bo Derek, meet Jack Scalia and Peter Barton and Rick Edwards and . . . -- By Gerald Clarke. Reported by Denise Worrell /Los Angeles

With reporting by Denise Worrell /Los Angeles This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.