In Its Notorious Season Season, Baywatch Nights Shamelessly and Ineptly Ripped Off The X-Files as It Pivoted Nonsensically to Supernatural Mystery
When NBC cancelled Baywatch after a single season of lackluster ratings and scathing reviews David Hasselhoff and the show’s creators and producers gambled on themselves and hit the jackpot.
After failing as a network drama, Baywatch succeeded as a syndicated international ratings dynamo that won Hasselhoff the impressive, nebulous, impressively nebulous title of “The World's Most Watched Man on Television" from the Guinness Book of World Records in tribute to the astonishing global popularity of Baywatch.
According to the hype, Baywatch at one point boasted an audience of over a billion viewers in 140 countries. That’s not just good: that’s ostensibly better than any other television program in the history of the universe since the beginning of time.
Would they give the man. a certificate if wasn’t true?
So when a Baywatch spin-off about the exciting, sexy, music-filled adventures of Hasselhoff’s moonlighting lifeguard-turned-shamus Mitch Buchannon called Baywatch Nights struggled in its first season, Hasselhoff could be forgiven for imagining that with some tinkering and a new direction the second season of Baywatch Nights could explode in popularity the way Baywatch did upon hitting syndication.
In its infamous second season, Baywatch Nights found inspiration in an unlikely place: The X-Files, a cult hit that had captured the cultural zeitgeist with its savvy combination of monsters, mysteries and explosive sexual chemistry.
The kids sure seemed to dig bogeymen and Draculas and Chupacabras and Frankensteins and various other things that go bump in the night. So in a miscalculation of historic proportions, Baywatch Nights decided that, fuck it, monsters were suddenly real and it was now Mitch’s job to stop them.
Baywatch Nights wasn’t just switching genres and tones dramatically, it was switching realities. It was morphing unexpectedly from a detective show in which the supernatural does not exist to a horror show where everything is supernatural.
It’d be like if Archie Bunker’s Place decided to stay on the air for one last season by having Archie Bunker fight Frankensteins and the Wolfman or if the goofs of Hogan’s Heroes squared off against Cenobites and Creatures from the Black Lagoon as well as hilariously incompetent Nazis.
If you were to make a list of actors whose personas are so big and so cheesy that it becomes impossible to see them as anything else, Hasselhoff would be near the top.
Yet the second season of Baywatch Nights nevertheless asks us to suspend disbelief and become emotionally invested in the reality of David Hasselhoff playing a lifeguard by day and monster hunter by night.
When does he sleep? Who knows? He’s such an Uber-mensch that after a long day of saving lives and a long night of fighting EVIL in all of its form all he needs is a fifteen minute nap and then he’s up and raring to go.
Mitch is also a father, something that is referenced only once in passing so that we don’t think less of this God among men just because he’s too busy with fighting mummy curses and the like to help his son with his homework or drive him to school.
#Scary
Baywatch Nights made the fatal mistake of assuming that The X-Files was successful due to its most easily replicable elements, that it was a hit because the public angrily demanded murder, mysteries and male-female leads with a “will they or won’t they” dynamic.
The reality is that The X-Files was a pop phenomenon because everybody wanted to fuck David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson, be David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson, or some combination of the two. The monsters and world-building didn’t hurt but it was fundamentally all about sex, and sex, weirdly enough, is one of the many things that this uniquely off-brand Baywatch variation is lacking.
To the extent that a show as surreally lazy and cynical as Baywatch Nights exudes any effort at all, it tries way too hard to be The X-Files and fails in every conceivable way. This isn’t a show inspired by The X-Files; it’s 22 episodes of Baywatch cosplaying as The X-Files in a homemade costume its way too indulgent mom made for it.
Instead of Duchovny with his offbeat sexuality and quirky deadpan humor we’re stuck with the perversely asexual, avuncular Hasselhoff in dad jeans and denim jackets straight from the Jay Leno Collection at Sears.
In place of Gillian Anderson’s icy cool and smoldering sensuality we have Angie Harmon as Mitch’s partner and love interest Ryan. Harmon warms up over the course of the season but initially seems less like a foil for our hero than an exposition-delivering robot who delivers reams of information in a husky, raspy monotone.
Baywatch Nights limply tries to recreate The X-Files’ dense world-building and free-floating paranoia pretty much exclusively through the character of Diamont Teague (Dorian Gregory), the mysterious, shadowy puppet-master who hires Mitch and Ryan to explore the world of the eerie and unexplainable.
The notorious flop desperately needs Gregory to convey mystery, danger and authority. He’s a handsome man with a deep, sonorous voice but his vibe is nevertheless bootleg Byron Allen/less indulgent Kevin Eubanks. Like everyone involved with Baywatch Nights he’s way too much of a giant fucking cheeseball to be as spooky and enigmatic as he’s supposed to be.
Who is Teague working for? To what end? Is he a government agent? Is he a space alien? The answers to this, and every other question involving Baywatch Nights’ final season is who knows and who cares?
The success of Baywatch made Hasselhoff the top paid actor in syndication. That meant that most of the show’s budget went towards an element guaranteed to keep it from being scary—the living personification of kitsch and bad taste in a lead role behind the scenes as well as in front of the camera—to the expense of all of the things that would make it scary, like production values, make-up, creature design and veteran writers and producers with experience in horror.
Paying H.R Giger a fraction of Hasselhoff’s salary to design Baywatch Nights’ monsters would instantly make the show ten times better. Alas, for a spin-off of the most watched show in the world, starring the most watched man on television, Baywatch Nights is bizarrely, inexplicably cheap.
The primary weapon in Baywatch Nights’ arsenal of scares is darkness. It subscribes to the notion that if scene after scene is shrouded in near-total blackness then audiences won’t be able to see how cheap everything is.
Time and time again, Baywatch Nights will lean way too hard on the audience’s ability to create terror out of nothing at all. It will show a dimly lit wall being pounded on, accompanied by a monstrous howl, then leave it to the audience to imagine the unthinkable, spine-chilling horror that must lurk behind the wall, just beyond our sight.
But since nothing Baywatch Nights does show us is remotely scary I couldn’t help but assume that what we weren’t seeing would be somehow even less frightening, just a stunt man in a rubber monster costume bought off the rack at an undiscriminating Halloween store.
“Dimly lit” is Baywatch Nights entire aesthetic. In an episode that anticipates Peter Hyams’ famously shitty adaptation of A Sound of Thunder Mitch and Ryan journey to an alternate dimension future that, unsurprisingly, looks like a few dark rooms in an empty building.
Baywatch Nights doesn’t just suffer from production values roughly on par with Roger Corman productions from the mid 1990s; it suffers from a paucity of spirit and imagination as well.
It doles out scare sequences stingily. It knows that it has nothing, creatively, so it rations out that nothing carefully.
Within the dark universe of the show Ryan is a true believer in all things spooky and impossible to explain while Mitch is a skeptic despite a staggering amount of evidence that we are not alone.
Late in the season Ryan brings up the terrifyingly real possibility that what they might be dealing with is a mummy and a mummy’s curse. Mitch scoffs at the notion as patently absurd. A mummy? In Los Angeles in 1996? Why the sheer notion is preposterous!
Or at least it would be preposterous if Mitch and Ryan did not literally deal with a monster of the week every bit as absurd as an ancient Egyptian ghoul running amok in the city of Angels in the middle of the Clinton era.
In a rare bit of humor, Mitch dismisses the notion of a mummy in L.A as Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein foolishness, as if Baywatch Nights were not fundamentally Lifeguard Mitch Meets Lady Dracula and the Wolfman and the Evil CD-Rom Game and The Sinister Green Ooze.
For Baywatch Nights, no premise is too insultingly stupid to be taken seriously. An episode where vikings frozen in the middle of a blood feud are unfrozen a thousand years later and immediately start flipping around like Olympic gymnasts as they re-ignite their war of wills in a weird new world, for example, is begging for tongue-in-cheek treatment.
It would seemingly be impossible to do a straight-faced version of a story as goofy as “unfrozen, thousand year-old vikings renew conflict in contemporary L.A” but Baywatch Nights accomplishes the impossible and the regrettable by using this storyline to earnestly explore Mitch’s sense of honor.
In addition to being the world’s greatest lifeguard and a shockingly effective paranormal investigator, Mitch is an an expert on vikings. He knows their rituals and traditions and, in a line delivered without a hint of irony, self-consciousness or self-awareness, says that he feels a deep affinity for vikings and viking culture because he would have been a viking if he’d lived in viking times.
What are lifeguards/paranormal investigators, ultimately, if not the vikings of contemporary society?
On a similar note, when Mitch is possessed by a demon it would seemingly be a perfect time to go crazy with kitsch and camp and delirious self-parody. That’s not how Hasselhoff plays it, however. From the misplaced conviction he brings to his performance, you would think Hasselhoff was trying to become the first actor to win a Nobel Prize for a single episode of syndicated television.
Baywatch Nights never stops giving Hasselhoff unique acting challenges he is uniquely ill-equipped to tackle. The deadly yet noble unfrozen viking warriors aren’t the only aberration Mitch feels a deep affinity for.
An early episode shamelessly rips off Species through the character of a sexy woman created by a mad scientist who is at once dangerous and naive, an innocent but also an inhuman abomination.Oh, and it’s also established repeatedly that unlike most total babes, she is also amphibious. So even though she’s part-frog Mitch is still torn between wanting to protect her from harm because that is not only his job but his sacred calling, and wanting to make sweet love to her because she’s hot.
When it comes to monsters, the prevailing aesthetic here seemed to be, “Who cares?” Baywatch Nights disrespects the perpetually undervalued and dismissed field of horror both through its incorrect assumption that it was easy to pull off, even for a franchise as famously incompetent as Baywatch, and through its staggeringly inept execution.
Baywatch Nights seems to think it’s easy to do horror. It’s right in that it’s easy to do horror badly, to be cheesy and cliched and terrifyingly un-scary but it is VERY difficult to do horror right.
That’s why the greatest honor any artist, living or dead, can receive, is to be deemed a “frightmaster.” P.T Anderson may be a great filmmaker but is he a fright master? I don’t think so. Same is true of Wes Anderson.
Alas, no fright masters were consulted or employed in the making of Baywatch Nights, not even b-list masters of horror like Tom Holland or Tommy Lee Wallace.
Horror is a craft. Horror is an art. Horror is a world onto itself. The same is true of science fiction. In its fascinatingly dreadful endurance test of a second season Baywatch Night is artless and devoid of craft in a way that betrayed that its creators neither understood nor respected the genres it was throwing together willy nilly in a desperate attempt to keep a dog of a show on the air in violent defiance of common sense and the public’s wishes.
In the right hands and the wrong hands, twenty-two hours of entertainment can be a vast eternity in both the good and the bad sense. It’s one thing to know that a second season of Baywatch Nights exists and somehow spawned four more episodes that Freaks and Geeks in its entirety. It’s another to binge all twenty-two episodes in the space of a few days, as I did for this piece.
Over the course of just a single season, Baywatch Nights resorted to episodes about an EVIL CD-Rom game, the aforementioned episode about spooky unfrozen vikings and multiple episodes about possession, one of which involves a serial killer who infects people with his EVIL blood.
Pitches that would have gotten writers committed a season before, like Mitch getting struck by lightning, then having a telekinetic bond with an alien child at the mercy of a sinister extra-terrestrial cult, got the big green light for a season that’s nothing but insane ideas terribly executed.
As with The X-Files, the monster-of-the-week shenanigans are supposed to build to a glorious crescendo as the various strains intertwine and connect with the long-simmering sexual tension between the leads.
Baywatch Nights ends with Mitch kissing Ryan after tearfully confessing his love for her. With a weirdly misplaced look of accomplishment, Teague then slinks back into the shadows, his work done.
This suggests that the ultimate goal of this enigmatic, powerful figure with limitless resources and equally bottomless connections was to get two attractive straight white people to admit that they like like each other, and not just as friends.
Crazy to think this show wasn’t a huge success.
The expression on Teague’s face subtly but unmistakably conveys, “Now that I’ve gotten these co-workers who clearly were kind of into each other but were apprehensive about pursuing a romantic relationship for any number of reasons to smooch, I can shut down the shadowy, covert operation I work for and walk confidently into the sunset, my destiny fulfilled.”
This makes Teague seem less like a master of the universe than a glorified match-maker, one who understands that the path to true love is twisty, complicated and littered with Lady Draculas, mummy’s curses, evil CD-Rom games, sinister ooze and space aliens.
It was the beginning of what would undoubtedly have been a romance for the ages had the show survived. Instead it was an ending as well as a beginning.
Before Baywatch Nights debuted Hasselhoff adorably imagined that his future lie in detective heroics and movie stardom. It took the show’s high-profile failure to make him realize that the only role the public would ever accept Hasselhoff in, other than hunky lifeguard Mitch Buchannon and talking car owner Michael Knight, was good natured walking punchline/cheeseball icon David Hasselhoff.
To that end, in the years following Baywatch Nights’ cancellation, Hasselhoff has played a version of himself in Dear God, The Big Tease, Welcome to Hollywood, The New Guy, Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story, A Dirty Shame, The Spongebob Squarepants Movie, Kickin’ It Old School, Hop, Piranha 3DD, Keith Lemon: The Film, Stretch, Ted 2 and Killing Hasselhoff, a whole movie devoted to giving its titular star the business.
He’s played characters not named David Hasselhoff much less frequently. Winking, grinning self-parody is seemingly all the Knight Rider icon does these days, but when it comes to sheer perversity nothing he has done or will do can compete with the unintentional self-parody of the second season of Baywatch Nights.
Hasselhoff’s biggest success spawned his greatest failure. Hasselhoff was able to crawl back to his cash cow, which remained extraordinarily popular, but his career never quite recovered from the enduring humiliation of Baywatch Nights.
Hasselhoff now invites the world to laugh heartily at him and his black velvet camp legacy but the voluminous laughter that greeted his attempts to cross-breed his billion dollar baby with The X-Files was strictly of the unintentional and mocking variety.
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