Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past!  On Saturdays, I will be reviewing Baywatch, which ran on NBC and then in syndication from 1989 to 2001.  The entire show can be viewed on Tubi.

This week, Harvey gets to do something.

Episode 2.19 “The Lost Treasure of Tower 12”

(Dir by Cliff Bole, originally aired on April 27th, 1992)

After a season of appearing in the opening credits and rarely anywhere else, Harvey (Tom McTigue) finally gets a storyline. Because Mitch is going on a camping trip, he has Harvey replace him as the teacher of a windsurfing class. Harvey is excited because the students all attend a local girls’ school. That would presumably mean they’re teenagers, while Harvey appears to be in his thirties.

As Ben correctly deduces, Harvey has no idea how to windsurf. This becomes obvious as soon as Harvey and Ben meet the bikini-clad students on the beach. (Harvey tells all the girls to write down their phone numbers. Again: the girls are teenagers, and Harvey is definitely not.) After watching Harvey struggle with the basics, the students start to walk away. Ben steps up and announces that he can teach them. What follows is a montage of the girls windsurfing while a dejected Harvey stares straight at the camera.

That’s the B-plot. The A-plot features Michael Bendetti as Ian, a poet who lives on the beach and finds a box of stolen jewels a thief buried in the sand. Ian uses the jewelry to bankroll his courtship of Shauni. (Ian has a crush.) The thieves aren’t happy about that.

This episode just felt off. With his obsessive crush on Shauni, Ian comes across as a stalker, and yet I think we were supposed to be charmed by how relentless he was. There’s even an extended fantasy sequence in which Ian imagines dancing with Shauni under a chandelier suspended above the beach. Meanwhile, the main thief is so cruel that he throws the episode out of whack. It’s hard to reconcile a scene of Newmie and Eddie pulling a dead body out of the ocean with the lightweight humor of Harvey trying to windsurf.

This episode confirms something I’ve suspected from the moment I started reviewing this show. The early seasons of Baywatch worked best when they focused on David Hasselhoff’s somewhat corny but undeniably earnest portrayal of Mitch Buchannon. Whenever Hasselhoff isn’t in an episode (or appears in just one scene), the cynicism at the heart of the show — and the emptiness of its style-heavy approach — is much harder to ignore.

In short, Baywatch needed the Hoff.