Tom Selleck

For a decade Tom Selleck was the guy in the background of other people's films. He is billed as Stud in Myra Breckinridge, an aide to a captain in Midway, a small part in Coma, and one of the Sacketts in the 1979 miniseries. Then Magnum, P.I. arrived in 1980 and ran to 1988, bringing five Emmy nominations for lead actor in a drama and a win in 1984. He has a Golden Globe as well.

What Magnum established is a specific and undervalued skill: he is funny without ever signalling that he is being funny. The comedies bear it out. 3 Men and a Baby works because he plays panic completely straight, In & Out gets its best scenes from his unbothered calm, and his run as Richard Burke on Friends works because he underplays every line in a room full of people who do not. He is also physically enormous on screen and never uses it, which is the trick.

The second half of the career splits cleanly. He became one of the few reliable Western leads left, in Quigley Down Under, Crossfire Trail, Last Stand at Saber River and Monte Walsh, and then spent 2005 to 2015 on nine Jesse Stone television films drawn from Robert B. Parker's novels, which are slow, sparse, alcoholic little detective pictures that suit him better than anything since Magnum. Blue Bloods then took fourteen years of his life, from 2010 to 2024, as Commissioner Frank Reagan and the head of a dinner table.