The Genre-Hopping Madness of Baywatch Nights

I am pleased to report that I am nearly done with The Joy of Trash: Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place’s Definitive Guide to the Very Worst of Everything. My wife is currently doing a copy-editing pass, after which there will be three more drafts and then publication, glorious, glorious publication. 

I am super happy with the way it has turned out, and not just because I am so deeply invested in its success. It’s a glorious distillation of what makes this site special with all of its formidable strengths and none of its glaring weaknesses. 

I polished the very best pieces in the site’s four and a half year history to a blinding sheen and created nine brand spanking new entries that perfectly complement the existing articles. 

I initially planned to only write about the second season of Baywatch Nights. That’s the infamous season where David Hasselhoff and his enablers decided to cynically cash in on the success and popularity of The X-Files and make their silly show about an impossibly, improbably busy lifeguard by day/detective by night a science fiction show about a pair of paranormal investigators EXACTLY like Fox Mulder and Dana Scully. 

Curiosity got the best of me, however, so I decided that I would watch and write about an episode of the show’s first season to see how it compared to one of the most notoriously, exquisitely bonkers seasons in television history. 

I’m glad I did because the first season of Baywatch Nights was a goddamn revelation. It was every bit as improbable and insane as the monster-packed second and final season but it was also genuinely entertaining, a goofy lark that doesn’t take itself seriously as it keeps leaping joyously from peak to campy peak. 

And the guest stars! Geraldo Rivera in a VERY heavy dramatic role! Nancy Cartwright as a phone sex operator! Jason Hervey as part of an international gang of criminals who combine extreme sports and daring heists! Michael Winslow making crazy noises with his mouth! Skee-Lo as Skee-Lo getting dressed down by Lou Rawls for making that infernal hippety-hop music! 

The first season of Baywatch Nights offers an embarrassment of riches of the richly, gloriously embarrassing variety. I legitimately loved it, which is why I didn’t just decide to write about it for The Joy of Trash; I decided to write up each individual episode for the book’s Backerkit campaign and the Happy Place Patreon account. 

The craziness of the pivot to spooky supernatural fare got all of the attention but Baywatch’s shift from earnest, oversexed yet weirdly innocent lifeguard melodrama to 1980s-style mismatched interracial buddy detective action-comedy was just as crazy and extreme. 

A lifeguard show that was all about glistening cleavage bouncing hypnotically in slow-motion became a light-hearted, campy, kitschy Lethal Weapon/Miami Vice variation and then a humorless, dour Xerox of The X-Files. 

I wish that Baywatch Nights had stayed on the air and rather than keep the gimmick of its heroes being monster-hunters it radically continued to change genres and tones every season. Season three could find Mitch and partner Ryan (Angie Harmon) chasing crooks in the Old West for reasons that are never explained. In season four they could be doctors! Season five could find our heroes running a small college while in season six they could switch things up a little so that they’re both teachers in an inner-city school and in season seven they could go back to being detectives. 

The problem, in my mind at least, is not that Baywatch Nights took a crazy turn in its second season that made no sense and scared away its exceedingly modest audience but rather that it didn’t live long enough to continue making equally, if not crazier turns into even more ridiculously inappropriate genres. 

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