Baywatch Nights

So, I've never made any secret of my weakness for the cheese-fest that is Baywatch.  Sure, it's crap, but it is also amiable, good natured crap that never really took itself particularly seriously.  While Baywatch remains well-remembered and re-run, (I have access to two streaming channels dedicated solely to running every episode, twenty four hours a day, seven days a week),  its spin-off Baywatch Nights remains less well known and less frequently re-run.  Spanning only two seasons and just forty four episodes, I'm not not sure that the series ever ran in its entirety on UK TV.  Certainly, I only recall a handful of episodes of the first season being screened in late night slots on ITV, several years after the show had ended in the US.  The reality, though, is that it is the notorious second series that is of interest to lovers of the bizarre and I'm pretty sure that it never saw the light of day in the UK.  The premise of Baywatch Nights was that Mitch Buchanon (David Hasselhoff) and his Baywatch cop buddy Garner (Gregory Alan Williams), set up business as private eyes, as a side hustle.  Their office is above a club and they have a couple of other PIs on the books, (both young and photogenic).  The first season proceeded along relatively conventional Private Eye TV series lines and failed to really find an audience.  So, for season two, a major conceptual change was made - having seen the success that the X-Files was enjoying, the producers of Baywatch Nights sought to turn it into a science fiction orientated show for its second season.  Out went Garner (with no explanation), to be replaced by the mysterious Diamont Teague (Dorian Gregory), some kind of paranormal expert apparently tied into some indeterminate high level organisation dealing with weird shit.  Who better to employ as your agents for investigating this sort of stuff than a private detective agency run part-time by a lifeguard?

I've finally been able to start watching season two of Baywatch Nights thanks to the fact that someone has uploaded all but one episode up onto a certain video site. (They appear to be ripped from a German DVD release: the episode titles are in German and the end titles include credits for a German language version, although the episodes all have the original English soundtrack).  Having watched the first couple of episodes, I have to say that while they try to emulate something of the visual style of X-Files, the end result feels closer to the Kolchak: The Night Stalker TV series, with its 'monster of the week' format.  Moreover, despite an initial focus on science fiction subjects, the series quickly slipped into supernaturally themed plots, reinforcing the Kolchak comparison.  The whole transition to the new format is, to say the least, confusing and abrupt.  Teague simply doesn't get an introductio - he's just there in the first episode of the season, inveigling Mitch and co into investigating a shipwreck.  No explanation of who he is, where he's appeared from or what he does, is proffered.  The second episode implies his 'high level' connections - he has influence with the police and has an official-looking contact at the end of a phone in an office in some unspecified location.  Meanwhile, one of the PIs from season one, Ryan (Angie Harmon), now seems to have become some kind of crack scientific investigator, complete with a lab on a boat.  It's all quite disconcerting, with the sense that you might be experiencing some sort of fever dream reinforced by the fact that the first two episodes seem to involve Mitch and sidekick Griff (Eddie Cibrian), being either chased or chasing after monsters in some gloomy venues.  In episode one they find themselves chased all over a sunken ship by a barely glimpsed, (let alone explained), aquatic Yeti, (at least, that's what I think it was), in the second they end up chasing an amphibious creature created in and escaped from a lab, now transformed into beautiful, but savage, girl, around a nightclub, then some tunnels. (This episode, in part, seems to be inspired by the film Species, even down to the casting of the girl creature with an actress who bears a resemblance to Natasha Henstridge).

Baywatch Nights is so far shaping up to be the source of some good schlocky entertainment, although it already easy to see why this version of the show couldn't find an audience either, resulting in its cancellation.  All the weird goings on jar somewhat with the Baywatch universe they take place in - while the parent series had its flights of fancy, it rarely ever went wholeheartedly into this sort of territory, with most of the action centering on the more mundane business of rescues and regular criminals threatening the beach. Sure, there was the odd supernatural themed episode, like the two parter with the haunted hotel where Summer gets felt up by a ghost, but these were exception rather than the rule.  Indeed, any 'monsters' menacing the beach in Baywatch were always revealed, Scooby Doo style, as either hoaxes (evil oil companies or developers trying to scare people off, for example), or natural phenomena, (octopuses and giant electric eels, for instance).  Mitch fighting scaly monsters or exorcising ghosts on his days off (and never mentioning it to his life guard buddies), just doesn't really sit right.  Still, it remains decent, bizarre, fun in a Kolchak-lite sort of way.  I'm aware that there are some truly bat shit crazy episodes to come, (including a pair of thawed out Vikings fighting it out in LA), so I've a lot to look forward to over the next few weeks.