Wow, Was Baywatch Really That Bad?

[TMC]

https://screenrant.com/pam-tommy-bay...rs-scenes-bad/

Hulu's Pam & Tommy episode 3 put Baywatch's misdeeds in the spotlight, showing the double standards applied to female and male characters.

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https://haphazardstuff.com/baywatch-2017-movie-review/

Baywatch was the cream of the crop when it came to guilty pleasure TV shows. Watching it was about experiencing bad acting, ludicrous plots and seeing bathing beauties in swimsuits. That was about it. Ok, it did have David Hasselhoff, but it was very hard to take him seriously in his role as lead lifeguard Mitch Buchannon. He has the unique knack of trying to be as sincere as possible in the most ridiculous scenes.

That was really the fun of Baywatch. You didn’t really watch it for any kind of serious drama, but rather reveled in the entertainment value of how bad it was. It was trash TV.

Between endless music montages and the famous slo-mo running, the show presented outlandish stories like escaped criminals, attacking squids, earthquakes or life and death surfing competitions and beach romances. The fact it tried to play everything as straight and sincere as possible turned the show into something so gleefully absurd that it was hoot to watch. That was part of its charm….as unplanned as it might’ve really been.

I’ll admit, I still occasionally watch an episode and truly get a jolt of adolescent enjoyment reveling in the ‘so bad, it’s downright hysterical’ aspects of Baywatch. Finally catching my breath from laughing after watching Hasselhoff perform surgery on an escaped criminal, I remind myself – this was actually put out on television and millions of people were watching it.

That fact alone is more interesting and funnier than anything the big-screen version does.

[biffbronson]

The reason people watched Baywatch was to see attractive actors in swimsuits, it's as simple as that, and there's nothing inherently wrong with that. Anyone expecting great dramas or tightly plotted scripts was/is in for a disappointment.

Most every critic delights in tearing things apart and saying something is not worthwhile. It wasn't for everyone, but not everyone tuned in expecting great literature of the airwaves. Too many critics like to think they're above the average person, and anyone who enjoys something that they pan must be a moronic miscreant.

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Baywatch: ’90s Trash TV Reevaluated as Cult Oddity

Whether there is actually a renaissance of interest in Baywatch that is leading to its reevaluation as a time capsule masterpiece of campy junk food television or if that’s just something that’s occurring in my own mind, I’m not sure. Frankly, its recent, remastered resurfacing on Amazon Prime and Hulu is enough to convince me that I’m not alone, but then again, I’m the guy who frequently mentions Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama and takes it as confirmation of its popularity when one person knows what I’m talking about, so my frame of reference isn’t all that expansive on these matters.

In any case, the cultural impact of Baywatch is certainly not up for debate. At one point in time, the show was syndicated in 144 countries and translated into 15 different languages, giving it the Guinness World Record for most watched television series of all time with an audience of well over a billion people (David Hasselhoff also holds the record for most watched man in television). So I am in no way claiming to be plucking some obscure little cult show from the past to reevaluate it. Not at all.

But despite being the worldwide phenomenon that it obviously was, Baywatch was — shall we say — not exactly a highly regarded show, even if it was seen and known by almost everybody. It was the ultimate in junk food television, and it existed as a giant pop culture punchline throughout most of its run. Parodies of buxom lifeguards with unrealistically flawless hair and makeup running in slow motion on the beach were everywhere, even in children’s programs of the time. The general perception is that it was a show that was popular solely because of the sex appeal of its cast — both the male and female stars, but probably mostly the women — and therefore functioned primarily as a glorified substitute for softcore porn in a time when actual porn was a bit harder to come by (this being a few years before the internet had fully proliferated into the common household).

So despite the show having a reach of over a billion people — at the time, about a fifth of the world population — the common perception of it was chalked up to that: it was just attractive people running around in slow motion on the beach, and nothing more. Did the show have a loyal following? I don’t know, because based on that synopsis, I have to wonder if people were actually watching it. It was ubiquitous in syndication, so it’s entirely possible that even people who did watch it just caught an episode here and there, rolled with the consensus about it, and moved on. I doubt there were many people who made it a point to follow it closely for all 240 episodes spanning across 11 seasons (and that’s not even including the spinoff, which I will most assuredly get to later).

Now that we’re living in the age of binge watching, however, it’s much easier to view the series in a completely different way than any of us did back in its ’90s heyday. With every episode readily available at our fingertips, all neatly organized in chronological order, those curious souls who have opted to give it another look all seem to have reached the same conclusion:

Baywatch is a LOT weirder than any of us remember it being.