I don’t watch the show, but there was a big foofaraw this past summer when two of the show’s four main characters, Daniel Dae Kim and Grace Park, both quit after a salary dispute. They each wanted to be paid what Alex O’Loughlin and Scott Caan were paid, and CBS’s final offer to Kim and Park “was believed to have been 10-15% lower” than what O’Loughlin and Caan make in salary. After seven years of being paid less than the other two, I think I’d have said “pay up” too.

Anyway, the two characters had to be written out of the show somehow, so I was curious as to how that would be handled. Easy! Like so many other professionals, they left Hawai’i and moved to the Mainland!

In real life the reason most people move to the Mainland from Hawai’i is money. They can make more in their profession there or they can stretch the same pay a lot farther there, particularly for housing. The median price of a single-family house here was $795,000 three months ago. So it’s kind of a subtle joke that these two characters would head for the Mainland, presumably for more money, all while the real-live actors who played them couldn’t get the raise they wanted.

Maybe the writers didn’t think of it, but I did.