The Joy of Trash Excerpt: Season One of Baywatch Nights (1995-1996)

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https://www.nathanrabin.com/happy-pl...ghts-1995-1996

Despite devoting a sizable chunk of my life to documenting the insanity of Baywatch Nights’ supernatural second season for this book, I had no intention of watching any of its first season, let alone covering it.

Why would I? Compared to “Baywatch is The X-Files now, David Hasselhoff is David Duchovny and they’re fighting monsters every week,” turning a lifeguard adventure show into a cheesy 1980s-style interracial detective romp is comparatively predictable and sane.

But, as it so often does, curiosity got the best of me, and I resolved to watch and write about one episode of Baywatch Nights. I was instantly hooked. Before it made the regrettable choice to go spooky, Baywatch Nights was a masterpiece of accidental but utterly inspired self-parody.

If you were to slap the words “Adult Swim Presents” on the opening credits of “Pursuit,” the first episode to air, geeks and hipsters would declare it the most brilliant exercise in gleefully postmodern television satire this side of Lookwell and Heat Vision and Jack.

Hasselhoff would receive the best reviews of his career for the light touch he brings to this boldly stupid new vision of life for iconic lifeguard Mitch Buchannon, a winking self-awareness that suggests he knows just how ridiculous everything around him is and is having a goddamn blast.

How did a show whose star happily slathered on white face-paint to play an undercover mime, performed show tunes in drag while wearing a bulletproof vest, and joined his partner in donning chicken-themed fast-food get-ups turn into a science-fiction downer that refused to acknowledge even the possibility that there might be something silly about David Hasselhoff fighting mummies, vampires, unfrozen viking warriors, space aliens, and an evil CD-Rom game?

In its second season, Baywatch Nights wasn’t just a very different show: it was the antithesis of its first season. A show that didn’t take anything seriously, particularly itself, somehow morphed into a science-fiction monstrosity that took everything seriously, no matter how ridiculous.

Among its many fascinating miscalculations, the second season of Baywatch Nights made the fatal mistake of not letting David Hasselhoff be David Hasselhoff.

The infinitely superior first season, in sharp contrast, empowers Hasselhoff to be himself to the nth degree. Like Adam West, Bruce Campbell, or William Shatner, David Hasselhoff is a personality more than an actor.

Hasselhoff doesn’t disappear into roles. Instead, roles disappear inside the Knight Rider star’s impossibly vast, hammy persona.

In Baywatch Nights, Hasselhoff’s partners are Garner (Gregory Alan Williams), a black guy; and Ryan (Angie Harmon), a sexy, no-nonsense lady, but tonally and thematically they should be played by The Simpsons’ Troy McClure and Joe Camel.

That’s because Baywatch Nights is essentially a straight-faced version of Chief Wiggum P.I. from the legendary “The Simpsons Spin-Off Showcase” episode of The Simpsons—that is, if anything in Baywatch Nights can be deemed straight-faced.

Only instead of Springfield’s most inept crime fighter relocating to New Orleans and setting up shop as a private investigator, hotshot lifeguard Mitch is moonlighting as an overworked, underpaid gumshoe handling Malibu’s sexiest, tackiest crimes.

If Joe Camel were a television producer instead of a disturbingly phallic, unnecessarily sexual cigarette spokesperson for small children, Baywatch Nights is a show he would create. Baywatch Nights is the television equivalent of a Camel print ad of camels relaxing at a club where the blues is hot, the jazz is cool, and the taboo sex between Joe Camel and human women is hotter for transgressing every law governing the co-fraternization of man and beast.

Baywatch is less a television show than a Man Cave in television form that contains everything Hasselhoff loves in one place: hot tunes, cold drinks, designer duds, sports cars, beautiful babes, and light action executed with a wink and a goofy smile.

When Baywatch Nights debuted, Hasselhoff was bored with Baywatch, and producers were eager to hold onto him before he bolted his billon-dollar baby to become an A-list movie star with a shelf full of Academy Awards, so they gave him carte blanche to do whatever he wanted with a spin-off.

The problem, from a commercial standpoint at least, was that Baywatch Nights was created to please Hasselhoff rather than audiences who might understandably be confused as to why the lifeguard show with all the boobs was now a detective show.

In “Pursuit,” Baywatch Nights’ premiere, Hasselhoff addresses the audience directly to explain how Baywatch became Baywatch Nights in the most exquisitely half-assed manner imaginable.