Before I start, I know it's kind of pointless to complain about Baywatch, as it was a show that wasn't trying to be anything spectacular. A show about lifeguards who save lives, yes it's a very noble profession, as beaches and pools across the nation and even all over the world are very fortunate to have such a brave and strong group of people who will risk their own lives to save complete strangers who get stranded out in the water. I get that. But you see, the life of a lifeguard isn't as exciting or daring as, say, that of a police officer, a fire fighter, or a doctor. That's why there are many, many cop shows and doctor shows, but how many lifeguard shows are there? Just one. Despite it being an essential profession, it is still a boring one. How can you adapt a television series about that? Well, it seemed to all start in the wake of the 1988 writers' strike, you remember that? Networks had to recycle old shows to fill slots while their writers walked out on the job. The New Mission Impossible was a result of this. It was around that time that three guys came together, guys named Michael Berk, Douglas Schwartz, and Gregory Bonann, and I guess they wanted a really easy way to make a lot of money. You know the best way to do that? Make a television show. Oh, but they are not creative people in the slightest, they can't write, they can't direct, and they certainly can't edit. No problem, make a show about lifeguards, show plenty of skin and men and women running around on a beach. People will watch that. NBC had their doubts, of course, but being NBC, they gave it a shot. The cast of the first season was probably the best, in my opinion, as the people who joined in later years definitely pale in comparison. Leading the ragtag team of brave lifesavers is Mitch Buchannon, played by David Hasselhoff, fresh off of Knightrider. Now I know what you're thinking, how can they fill 60 minutes of run time on a weekly show of people just saving folks from drowning and performing CPR? Easy, add a ton of nonsensical stuff and make these people junior sleuths, firefighters, and even in Mitch's case, a superhero. I swear, sometimes I think he's really the last son of Krypton, and instead of moving to Metropolis and becoming Clark Kent, mild-mannered reporter for the Daily Planet, he moved to Southern California and became a lifeguard. Instead of a red cape, he's got red trunks. But really, Mitch is the only character to get any kind of depth or motivation, so when many viewers are asked who their favorite character is, they'll say it's him, because he's the ONLY character. Everyone else just feels like a stock character, and they're all poorly performed because NOBODY on this show knows how to act. I'm sure you've heard that in addition to bad writing, there was bad acting, and you are right. That's because when they cast actors, all you had to do was LOOK pretty. If you looked good in a bathing suit, you would get the job. That's why they mostly scoured magazine and modeling companies when trying to find their cast.
So, to properly sum up Baywatch, you would first have to identify what exactly the show is about. What genre is it? I would say drama, but it has elements of pretty much EVERY genre: there are episodes that are thrillers, that are sci-fi, even western. There was an episode where Eddie, Court and Craig go south of the border and get their jeep stolen, because the dumbasses left the keys in it, and they have to defend a rural Mexican town of crazy tourists lead by Burl Ives' redneck cousin. This show was all over the place, and sometimes people just acted like... well, they acted like terrible people. There was one episode where Captain Thorpe, the no-nonsense head of the lifeguards, wanted to fire Shauni because she inadvertently posed for a pinup calendar in front of her tower. She tried to explain the setup and the ruse used by the photographer, but Thorpe wouldn't listen. So Craig decided to show Thorpe how easy it was to get swindled, and ended up tricking him to posing for a very similar picture... and he fell for that because he's an idiot, so Shauni kept her job and was given a cash settlement by the fraud who photographed her, and she used the money to buy calendars for her friends. Great, no lesson learned. Some episodes are just really stupid, or things happen that leave you scratching your head. For example, there were a ton of episodes about shark attacks. Obviously, Berk, Schwartz, and Banana were big fans of Jaws, so they had to work in a shark plot at least once every season. A lifeguard named Jill is killed by a shark during the first season, and instead of dying immediately, she was allowed to linger at the hospital until the episode's end. Not sure why, but this happened because actress Shawn Weatherly wanted out of her contract as she felt this show had terrible writing and directing, and believe me, she won't be the last cast member to leave for such a reason. So they killed her off, much like M*A*S*H killed off Henry Blake when McLean Stevenson made one too many reasonable requests. Speaking of killing, Baywatch was canceled after the first season, but the creators fought to get it back on the air, and Hasselhoff even helped because I guess he didn't want to lose that steady paycheck. They got a syndicated network to pick it up, and Hasselhoff was named an executive producer for his troubles. This also means he was given more input into the show. The first thing he did was have Brandon Call, the actor who played Mitch's son Hobie, replaced by Jeremy Jackson, the worst child actor I've EVER seen, and have since heard he's grown up to be a "model" citizen. Why'd he do this? Well, there are two sides of the story. One says Call's parents took him off the show, and another says Hasselhoff wanted Hobie to stay a child a while longer, because Call had been through a growth spurt and I guess because he wanted the world to still believe he was 25, it wouldn't be believable to have a tall, 14-year-old son. Yeah, in your dreams, David. So, what else? Oh, there's a really stupid episode I wanted to talk about from Season 7: it's main plot is a rip-off of Romeo and Juliet, about a boy and a girl seemingly in love, but their parents are keeping them apart. The solution? Jump off a cliff so they can be together for eternity. Good lord! Thankfully, they mess up, and the boy just falls unconscious. Unfortunately, since he doesn't seem to have a brain in his head, he suggests they run off to Mexico instead. Why not just do that first? What was the point of jumping off a cliff? It's so stupid! Also, these two actors had no chemistry together and were not a believable couple. They couldn't even kiss on screen. While that was going on, we had a subplot about Cody seeing a mermaid. Yes, a mermaid. C. J. Doesn't believe him, but sure enough, she sees it too. An actual, live mermaid... in an episode where a young boy and girl attempt suicide. Sudden tonal shift much?! What's next, an episode about a child dying of cancer and a B-plot where C. J. sees aliens landing on the beach? Oh, and don't even get me started on the Baywatch at Sea World episode. See, if we've learned anything from Jaws 3, it's that movies and TV shows are NOT good venues for promoting Sea World! It's a very meta episode where they reenact their show at the water park, theme song and all. There's also a subplot about a man who hunts sea lions. He's like Captain Ahab hunting Moby Dick, except in Ahab's case, the whale took his leg. What, did a sea lion kill this man's family?
I could go on and on about the contrived plots, horrible writing, horrible directing, horrible editing, and horrible acting this show exhibits, but I think you all get the point. The biggest problem with Baywatch, aside from all of the above, is that it did NOT need to be sixty minutes. The plots are usually all resolved within the 30 minute mark, so they have to pad the episodes out like hell, more often than not resorting to long, drawn out under sea rescues. Storm drains, overturned vessels, crashed airliners, power plants, they always have to rescue people stranded under the water and running low on oxygen. Oh, I forgot to mention that in some cases, the actors don't even perform CPR the right way. How do you cock up the ONE thing all lifeguards have to know how to do in addition to the ability to swim?? These rescue scenes are very drawn out, having to show every, single, solitary step, and you know something about underwater scenes? They're boring. Everybody moves very slow, there's no dialogue, it's very uncomfortable. Unless it's a documentary on fish or whales, I don't want to see scenes set underwater! Sometimes they go out of their way to make a bus or a plane or a boat crash and sink in the water. That's because, oh, we resolved our threadbare plot in only half an hour and we got thirty minutes left, what do we do? Eh, crash a vehicle and trap people. The writing is very, very cliche, and when they try to be funny, oh my God, they are the most cringe-worthy scenes ever committed to film. Hasselhoff loves to ham it up when he's on camera, and as said before, nobody on this show can act. Pamela Anderson, I know she's an easy target, but when you build your whole career around your doctored body, you have to expect criticism. She left Baywatch in 1998 to start a movie career, being in such hits as Barb Wire, Scary Movie 3, and Blonde and Blonder- I think she won an Oscar for that. I can't really go into detail about the other characters in the series, because they are bland and forgettable. I mean, there are a few characters I liked, but of course they always got written off the series and replaced by blander ones. In closing, do I recommend Baywatch? Sure, there are much worse shows out there.
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