Remembering Baywatch

It has been a third of a century since Baywatch first hit the airwaves, and on streaming it is back, remastered and as bright and glossy as ever.

The show was unpretentious, light entertainment, and absolutely unashamed of the fact—indeed, made the most of it in a manner not unique to it (one finds that even action shows like this one, the original Magnum or MacGyver for instance, tended in the same direction), but arguably more successfully than its contemporaries. Helpful here was the setting and its associated imagery--the sun, the sand, the surf, and of course, the Baywatch beauties, every bit of it redolent with the mystique southern California had not yet begun to lose, and all of it shot in that glorious music video-style that the makers of television for the small screen were just then mastering as the makers of film for the big screen had before them. Helpful, too, was the fact that if the show did not wholly shut out reality (indeed, shut it out rather less than a good deal of "serious" drama praised to the skies by the critics) it rarely got gritty or brutal, and made the viewer feel that the characters inhabited a world where yanking Darwin Award aspirants out of the water was the biggest problem with which the world had to contend, and being a lifeguard on the beach accordingly the most important job in that world--a situation that, I think, most of us would regard as a vast improvement over the polycrisis-ridden world in which we had even then been living for as long as anyone could remember.

It was a winning combination--according to the legend, at any rate, getting well over a billion regular viewers globally at its height, making it the most-watched show in history--a title no show would seem likely to claim from it in this crowded and fragmented media universe, the more in as the strategy for surviving in the ever-more brutal attention economy seems to be to aim for intense appeal at the expense of wide; and much of what made this show such a hit now so unfashionable as to be virtually impossible (and in cases, unlikely even to be tolerated were it attempted).

Still, the fact that it isn't quite like anything they make now is the more reason for its lingering in the public consciousness the way it has, its stars still pop cultural icons. Thus did I find when looking at a list of the 500 most searched-for keywords that, a generation after her departure from the show, Pamela Anderson is on that list (at #435), making her still one of the most searched-for celebrities in the world. Meanwhile, one of the very few ahead of her is her fellow Baywatch alum, Carmen Electra--at #87, putting her behind only Kim Kardashian!

Looking over her list of credits there can be no doubt about which of them contributed most to that standing.