This Looks Terrible! Baywatch Nights Season One: "Pursuit"

I am so ridiculously sentimental that I don’t just get sad at the end of long projects involving beloved artists I feel an intense emotional connection to, like The Weird Accordion to Al: I legit felt felt a bittersweet pang of loss when I came to the end of marathon binges of Shasta McNasty and the notorious second season of Baywatch Nights for my upcoming book The Joy of Trash. 

Don’t get me wrong: Shasta McNasty and The Baywatch Files were every bit as terrible as their reputations suggest, if not worse. Yet I felt a weird affection for them all the same, if only because I spent so much damn time watching them: twenty-two hour-long episodes of Baywatch Nights and twenty episodes of Shasta McNasty.

There are twenty-two episodes of Shasta McNasty but two aren’t available on Youtube and I am not about to stand in front of you and lie about the amount of Shasta McNasty I have consumed. I respect you too goddamn much to do something like that. 

I suppose I also have an incongruous fondness for Shasta McNasty and the supernatural incarnation of Baywatch Nights because I had so much fun writing about them that they ended up providing a fair amount of pleasure and enjoyment, albeit indirectly.

I was so reluctant to say goodbye to the wonderfully weird, transcendently cheesy universe of Baywatch Nights that when I discovered that pretty much the entire series was available on Youtube I decided that I would re-up and watch at least one episode of the first season of Baywatch Nights, the infamous flop that had the whole world laughing at David Hasselhoff longer, louder and more intensely than usual. 

Boy am I glad that I did! If you were to slap the phrase “Adult Swim Presents” into the opening credits of “Pursuit”, the first episode to air, geeks and hipsters would declare it the most brilliant exercise in gleefully post-modern 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 ridiculous everything around him is and is having a goddamn blast.

This is in sharp contrast to the weird dourness of the second of Baywatch Nights, which made the poignant mistake of taking itself very seriously and thinking that a Baywatch spin-off starring David Hasselhoff could be genuinely scary. 

It speaks to just how utterly insane the second season of Baywatch Nights is that it makes the first season seem sane, safe and predictable by comparison when it is anything but. 

Baywatch Nights took such an insane, widely mocked detour into monster country in its second season that when we end up discussing the show’s campy good-badness we invariably end up discussing episodes involving lady Draculas and the Wolfman and not David Hasselhoff in Armani suits trading wisecracks and clues with partners in an office next to a blues club called Nights owned by Lou Rawls where everyone hangs out. 

In Baywatch Nights, Hasselhoff’s partners are a black guy and 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, that is, if anything in this delightful bit of Uber-camp 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 gumshoe sexily solving Los Angeles’ sexiest 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, since it’s the television equivalent of a Camel print ad of camels relaxing with some cancer sticks at a club where the blues is hot, the jazz is cool and  the taboo sex between Joe Camel and the human women who desire him is hotter for transgressing every law, ethical, legal, moral and otherwise, 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 likes in one place: hot tunes, cold drinks, Armani suits, 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 consequently was that Baywatch Nights was created to please Hasselhoff and make him happy rather than being made for audiences who might understandably be a little confused as to why the lifeguard show with all the boobs was now a detective show with considerably less boobs.

To underscore what a ridiculous male fantasy Baywatch Nights is and how shamelessly it plays to star, Executive Producer, and co-creator Hasselhoff’s ego, much of “Pursuit” revolves around real-life supermodel Carol Alt, playing a Carol Alt-like sex symbol, poorly, trying to seduce Mitch with her legendary curves.

The iconic super-model puts on a wet and wild one-woman swimsuit  fashion show for her hunky bodyguard while he looks DIRECTLY AT THE CAMERA with a shit-eating expression that silently but powerfully conveys, “Nice work if you can get it!”, “It’s good to be the king!”, “You CAN Hassle the Hoff!”,“Schwing!” and finally and most literally, “my penis is so hard right now I could use it to cut a hole through a diamond coffee table.” 

Daddy likes! Daddy likes!

Hasselhoff looks directly at the camera as well in a fourth wall breaking opening in which he addresses the audience directly to explain how Baywatch became Baywatch Nights in the most exquisitely half-assed manner imaginable. 

Oozing Troy McClure smarminess, Hasselhoff confides in us, his friends in the audience, “You know some people think the beach closes after the sun goes down. Uh uh. That’s when it really starts to heat up. Especially if you’re a PI. Now I know what you’re thinking: Mitch is a lifeguard. What does he know about being a PI? Well, they both involve rescuing people.

It turns out my best friend Garner went partners in a bankrupt detective agency with a beautiful brunette PI who left New York for the California sun and adventure. What can I say? When someone yells “help” I jump in with both feet! And I hope you do too as we introduce a new series of private eye adventures called Baywatch Nights! Sit back and ENJOY the ride.” 

“The Simpsons Spin-Off Showcase” didn’t air until Baywatch Nights’ sadistically, gloriously excessive forty-four, two season run had ended and while it’s obviously very overtly based on stuff from the 1970s like the Brady Bunch Variety Hour, it is uncanny how much this feels like a pitch-perfect Simpsons parody.

After reading those words and seeing Hasselhoff’s delivery, I’m half-half-convinced that they should bring back Troy McClure and have Hasselhoff voice him, since he understands the character because he is him, in an existential sense as well as many others. 

That might sound like some of the stupidest dialogue in the history of the universe but put some lonesome blues guitar behind it and set it at sunset and BOOM you have television magic of the cheesiest sort. 

Hasselhoff’s opening spiel is only a smidgen more convincing than “Somehow, Palpatine returned” although I do like the idea that since being a lifeguard and P.I work both entail rescuing people, if you can do one, you can do the other. Teachers and doctors also both help people, but my wife’s Masters in teaching doesn’t make her qualified to perform minor surgeries. 

But Hasselhoff wanted to do a detective show so fuck it, Baywatch was now a detective show. One where he wore Armani suits and drove a sports car despite ostensibly being a broke lifeguard and partners in a struggling, bankrupt detective agency and music was everywhere, cheesy, cheesy music that filtered the pain and spiritual despair of the blues through the whitest, most contemporary filter imaginable. 

The opening credits are pure kitsch, something out of Tim Heidecker’s meta canon or the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage” video, right down to the “And Lou Rawls” credit for the iconic Garfield and Friends’ theme song crooner’s role as the Lou Rawls-like owner of Nights.

Sure enough, when the opening credits end, we’re treated to a blues guitarist in shadow laying down some tasty licks. Maybe he’s onstage or backstage at Nights. Maybe he’s at Joe Camel’s nightclub. Maybe he’s in Billy Crystal’s Blues Man Land or maybe David Hasselhoff’s imagination. 

While the unnamed mystery guitarist makes like Edge and plays the blues, a beautiful woman is stalked by an aggressive man with a camera and chased until she plummets from a cliff to her death. 

Then Hasselhoff starts in with folksy narration perversely heavy on baseball metaphors and chuckling ostentatiously at his own words. It would be easy to mock him for that but why should he be denied the kitschy pleasure of himself at his most ridiculously, transcendently over-the-top? 

Famous super-model Carol Alt spends much of her time onscreen modeling and plays a character very much like herself, except for considerably being more murdery, yet she still manages to give an almost impressively unconvincing performance. 

Alt, who is famous primarily for being a Sports Illustrated Swimsuit model and inspiring Alt-Rock, a guitar-heavy genre of songs about her legendary beauty, plays Cassidy, a model as icy as she is irresistible. 

Mitch instantly falls into a deep state of lust for her the moment he sets eyes on her beguiling form. 

They meet cute when Mitch sidles up to the horse she has been modeling with and responds to her asking, “How you doing, stud?” with a strangely casual “fine” before she specifies that she was talking to the horse. 

Mitch apparently thought she was greeting him, a complete stranger, with “How you doing, stud?”, which would be an excessively forward introduction for anyone other than Mae West. 

With offhanded misogyny Mitch says of his new partner and future love interest, “Ryan McBride grew up in Texas and got her pi license in New York. You know, women can really complicate your life, especially if you’re partners with one! It’s an EXPLOSIVE combination, trust me!” 

Sounds like men should never partner with women in order to avoid unnecessary complications and entanglements! 

Mitch next sees Cassidy being menaced by a bearded brute with the look and vibe of a henchmen who hurls barrels at you in Double Dragon. 

Cassidy claims that she’s being stalked by him and hires Mitch and his partners to work as bodyguards for her but Mitch has his doubts. That’s because if a sexy, icy, mysterious women expresses sexual desire in something like this it’s usually because she’s an evil murderer using sex to cover up her crimes. 

Sure enough, Cassidy shows Mitch her gun and describes it as her “sleeping pill” although the kind of sleep it provides is not the kind you want, in that you cannot wake up from it. 

Alt MUST have Mitch sexually so the supermodel FLINGS herself at the moonlighting lifeguard in scenes that suggest that during Baywatch Nights’ run, Hasselhoff was the happiest man in syndication as well as the best-paid. 

While explaining how the rules of baseball are like the rules of romance Hasselhoff audibly chuckles at himself when he purrs, “Three fingers was a change up. Heh heh heh. Change ups always caught you by surprise. You knew you shouldn’t swing at it but you. just. couldn’t. help. it.” 

On a similar note, Mitch probably shouldn’t have sex with the supermodel who won’t take no for an answer but he really wants to have sex with her because she’s so hot. 

“I got halfway to the plate before I realized that I misread the sign. I got tagged out at home. Even if you only miss by half a step, you still miss. But I still had one more at bat” Mitch narrates in another flurry of baseball metaphors. 

Cassidy, you see, turned out to be like a pinch hitter you put in late in the game, then pull out once you realize that she’s a murderer who killed a rival out of competition and framed someone else for her crimes. 

Mitch ends up learning, or rather re-learning, the harsh but essential lesson that beautiful women are evil killers. Cassidy is revealed as a murderer and Mitch is left to reflect on the crazy twists and turns of his very first case as a private investigator. 

Over more blues licks, Mitch summarizes the night’s lessons when he reflects via narration, “Failure is not in my vocabulary. But as I sat at Nights feeling sorry for myself, I realized that my first case as a PI was about as successful as my first day as a lifeguard. I had a lot to learn. At least Cassidy wouldn’t be doing any photo sessions for a while but a man named Grimes might still be alive if I trusted my instincts” 

By the end of the first season of Baywatch Nights, “failure” would most assuredly be part of Hasselhoff’s vocabulary. By the end of its second and final season, “spectacular, world-class, historic failure “would be part of Hasselhoff’s career as well as his vocabulary. 

That said, the first episode of the original incarnation of Baywatch Nights succeeded in entertaining the hell out of me both times I watched it. 

It’s a goddamn delight, a so bad it’s great camp classic just begging to be re-discovered. 

That’s why I WILL BE WRITING UP EVERY EPISODE OF BAYWATCH NIGHTS’ FIRST SEASON FOR PEOPLE WHO PRE-ORDER THE JOY OF TRASH and pledge to this site’s Patreon account! We begin today with “Bad Bladez”, a roller-blading themed episode featuring J. Peterman from Seinfeld as an evil rollerblading crime lord and Jason Hervey as his oblivious pawn! New articles will “drop” every month!

So if it’s alright with you, I think I’m going to keep watching the first season of Baywatch Nights and writing it up for Kickstarter and Backerkit patrons. So if that sounds like fun to you please consider pledging here https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace or here: https://the-joy-of-trash.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders/cart and let’s continue to explore this uniquely entertaining travesty together!