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Who Watches the Baywatchers?Baywatch: The final jiggle.

By Seth Stevenson
Posted Tuesday, May 22, 2001, at 3:00 AM ET
Baywatch cast members

Baywatch Hawaii (formerly known as Baywatch, and not to be confused with the short-lived Baywatch Nights) will soon air for the final time. Say a little prayer for the passing of this, the apex of spectacularly mediocre syndication. Perhaps you never watched an episode, flipping past it as you would Wings, but remember that Baywatch used to be big. Huge. For more than a decade, through a near-ceaseless procession of shark attacks and mouth-to-mouth resuscitations, the Baywatch lifeguards have worn their curvy suits for you, whether you cared or not. So show a little respect.

Dropped after one season on NBC, Baywatch continued in syndication when its producers saw what a hit it was overseas. (I'm getting my facts here from the Baywatch Awesome fan site.) No translation was needed for slo-mo shots of beautiful women running in bathing suits, boobs a-wobble. In fact, I've always felt that the show's bumpers—slow pans across wet-suited asses as a woman chirps, "Baywatch will be right back!"—offered the purest distillation of its elements.

Targeting international fans, the shows became loose collections of non sequiturs, lacking cohesion or conclusion: Start with a dream sequence; followed by ... a shark attack!; then some horseplay on the beach; then a music collage; another shark attack; another music collage; roll credits. Throw in some shrewd peripheral casting (and by this I mean really large-breasted women), anchor it with David Hasselhoff, and you've got a winning formula.

Say what you will about Pamela Anderson, Yasmine Bleeth, Erika Eleniak, Donna D'Errico, Nicole Eggert, or any of the dozen other hotties who cycled through the cast, it was Hasselhoff who held this thing together. The show could have survived its move to Hawaii in Season 10 (seen one shark-menaced beach, seen 'em all), but not its star's departure. Watching the new, Hasselhoff-less episodes forces one to admit the show's utter lack of coherence. When your plot is devoid of any sense of time, continuity, or cause and effect, you need something reliable at the core. Hasselhoff, 6 feet 4 inches, blinding white teeth, leathery skin, was nothing if not rock solid. And he could play for laughs, too. In one vintage episode recently rerun, guest-starring Geraldo Rivera as a dweeb looking for romance tips, Hasselhoff calls out, "Hey, flat-butt!" to Rivera across the beach.

Without Hasselhoff, the show flounders around. The final episode's a perfect example. The plot, basically: A beach bunny steps on a piece of glass, and the lifeguards help her, and then the main lifeguard gets an offer to start a new lifeguard training center in Australia, but the lifeguard he loves gets proposed to in front of him by her Navy SEAL boyfriend, but then a different lifeguard accidentally sees her naked, and then there's a bachelor party (the same day he proposes!) for the SEAL, and a band plays and there's a fistfight, and then there's a traffic accident and a guy needs CPR, and then the wedding gets broken off because the SEAL has to go on an emergency mission. And I'm leaving so much out. By the time both the mayor of Honolulu and Pat Morita (as "Mr. Tanaka"—oh, how far he's come from his "Mr. Miyagi" days) perform their 30-second cameos, you're too drained and confused to do anything but watch boobs wobble.

The writers didn't know this would be the last episode, but the final scene is somehow appropriate. The lifeguards, all together in their lifeguard speedboat, chop across the ocean toward the sunset, expectant smiles on their faces: "Who will need CPR next?" they seem to wonder, attractively. A sort of Chekhovian zero ending, enhanced, once again, by jiggling.

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Seth Stevenson is a frequent contributor to Slate.
Still by Neal Preson/Corbis.
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Reader Comments From The Fray:





[Notes from the Fray Editor: Marshall Rubin speaks, we're sure, for many: "Aside from the impeccable acting and taut storylines, I found [Baywatch] most educational. Without having to listen to monotone narrators on the Nature or Discovery Channels, I learned so much about oceanography, anatomy, and more." Fray star Zeitguy read Roger's truly splendid post (see below) and, impressed that he took all that from Baywatch, gave him a Silk Purse from Sow's Ear award. He then took Roger to task of course—he is forever Zeitguy. Roy Jaruk is interested in season finales, here, though apparently not in the Baywatch episode under discussion.



William (who once met David Hasselhoff!) spoke for his generation: "Sadly, after joining the real world of the nine-to-fivers, marriage, minivans, and a home loan, I have not watched Baywatch for some time. [But] I will miss it…" And we liked the unusual combination of altruism, Belinda Carlisle and Sopranos, below, as well as the stunning story of the Man Who Cried. A good Fray, a snapshot of American life, and not nearly as many Posts We Don't Like as we feared, given the subject matter.]





There are so many questions [about Baywatch], especially why, exactly, it was "the most watched show in the world." I once saw Tom Wolfe give a talk at Yale, and he adduced, in the conservative pundit persona he's seamlessly assumed over the years, the Chinese dissenters as proof that America stands out in the world as a beacon of freedom. And I thought, what a shame that Tom Wolfe thinks that he's a thinker, now. Because the old TW, with his five senses out for dayglo on racing cars and the fashion sense of Black Power spokesmen and spaced out pranksters, knew that the whole trick was in stuff--the no ideas but in things slogan of the modernists had magically come true as a cultural norm. And that that is the magic of America for the Chinese--not the Statue of Liberty, but the unembarrassed expression of desire. Not, in other words, James Madison, but the Situationalists. Unfortunately, I don't think anybody on, say, Foreign Affairs magazine ponders Baywatch--but if they did, they might get a more real sense of the relationship between America and the rest of the world, that package of ambiguous attraction and visceral disgust with which the third world, at least, perceives us.



--Roger



(To reply, click here.)





I never cry, I believe that men don't cry because they have to be tough. I went to many funerals and I still never cry. But last Sunday I cried watching the Baywatch final episode. What the hell was that? I was left hanging. What the hell will happen between Sean and Leigh, or Kekoa and Jedi?



--Jacob Petion



(To reply, click here.)





Baywatch is one of the few truly altruistic shows on TV (glorifies helping people rather than helping likable people by killing unlikable ones). Critics have been much kinder to VIP although it is just Baywatch with a lot of totally absurd violence. Don't even talk about the morality of the critically acclaimed Sopranos. Baywatch wasn't perfect. In its final years it got more mean-spirited (perhaps to compete with the sadism of nearly all other action shows), but in its heyday it was almost as good as a Belinda Carlisle music video. You knew it couldn't survive in the TV wasteland.



--Unapologetic Baywatcher



(To reply, click here.)





Oh my goodness I can hardly type from laughing. Tres sportif review, as the French would say. Seth Stevenson captures the mammary inanity and yet breezy appeal of the brain-dead Baywatch TV show.



--Natori



(To reply, click here.)



(5/24)



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