Baywatch as a Piece of Pop Cultural History

Baywatch had its premiere on NBC back in 1989 and actually was a network show for its first year, but after its cancellation by the network's execs it continued in first-run syndication.

It didn't begin the syndicated TV bonanza of the late '80s and '90s. Star Trek: The Next generation, which launched in 1987, can get more credit for really getting the trend going. But it was an especially large success (the "most watched show in history"), which besides inspiring a good deal of direct imitation (like a four-season revival of Flipper), and more broadly encouraged the boom (helping pave the way for such hits as Xena: Warrior Princess).

Watching it now one is reminded of other aspects of how TV used to be, with its lush opening credits sequences whose opening theme songs would became pop cultural standards; its episodic plots; its lightness of tone, even amid danger-filled action--not taking itself too seriously but also not being obnoxiously flippant. Even more striking in comparison with what we get in even today's lighter fare, distinctively lacking the "edginess" and meanness and pretention and the self-satisfaction that attends all these things we take for granted even in network sitcoms as the makers of the show endeavored to please rather than offend. This all made it the kind of easy viewing one finds only in certain niche sorts of programming these days (like the movies Hallmark and its rivals put on the air, which is generally not quite like this). There is, too, the profound L.A.-ness of the show, and indeed L.A.-ness from when L.A. was the embodiment of the American fantasy of "the good life," which, again, befit that light entertainment approach--people wanting to imagine themselves someplace more alluring than where they happen to be.

Owing to how well it all went over the show stayed on the air so long that its trajectory was to be bound up with the changes in television a decade after its launch. Amid the increasing crowding of the market a decade after its launch, followed by its peaking --and one might add, the general decamping of "Hollywood" Hollywood from what had so long been the default setting for American film and television production, and even the Lower Forty-Eight--the production relocated to Hawaii. This bought it no more than an additional two years, what was now called Baywatch: Hawaii airing its last episode on May 19, 2001.

In its way that date seems to me another little marker of the end of the "'90s," and the beginning of the twenty-first century, with the franchise's fortunes since confirming the distance pop culture traveled--by and large, not for the better. Unlikely material as it was for a big summer movie, that was exactly what Paramount offered up--with the script's writers opting for making the characters look like idiots in what was (mostly but not always) a parody of the original, heavy on frat-boy gross-out humor, rather less heavy on the appeal that drew viewers back week after week. (It was not even made in L.A., but instead in Florida and Georgia, and set in Florida's Broward County!)

It was no surprise that even the poptimists and outright claqueurs who now pass for "film critics" were unimpressed--and so far as I can tell, no hit with fans of the old show, the movie enjoyed or not enjoyed on its own terms, rather than as anything to do with that original. (Mostly "not enjoyed," to go by the ratings I have seen on the Internet Movie DataBase.)

Similarly a sign of the times would seem a comparison of Baywatch with that more recent fantasy of life in L.A., Entourage. With Entourage we have the celebration not of "golden Los Angeles" so much as "golden Los Angeles as experienced by Hollywood's favored few," courtesy of some of those few who again showed us the distance pop culture had traveled, and again, not for the better. The way this sort of thing is supposed to work is that we the audience feel ourselves there, vicariously living it up in this fictional world. Instead Entourage always made its viewers feel as if they had their noses pressed to the glass, looking in on someone else enjoying themselves at a party from which they barred--with those they were watching enjoy themselves a pack of thoroughly unlikable idiots. Indeed, one of the more perceptive comments about Entourage described it as "the most taunting show in TV history . . . show[ing] us what we're missing, and rub[bing] our faces in" it--and so for all the sun, the glamour and the rest made the viewer, just as much as any episode of Mad Men, think "I hate the world, and everything in it, myself included," depressing them without having earned the right by virtue of at least trying to say something important. Such does it go when a show comes from the "mind" of Mark Wahlberg, I guess, though in fairness he is a product of his time and milieu--all as he does that time and milieu no credit.