Billy Vera | Through the Shattered Lens

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, Mitch goes to his high school reunion!

Episode 2.12 “Reunion”

(Dir by Gus Trikonis, originally aired on January 27th, 1992)

Mitch gets laid.

That’s pretty much the plot of this incredibly simple episode.

It’s time for Mitch’s 20-year high school reunion but he doesn’t want to go because he’s worried about seeing his ex-wife, Gayle (Wendie Malick). However, at the last moment, Mitch suddenly does decide to go. He meets up with Gayle, who is wearing a blue dress that is simply to die for. With Gayle’s help, Mitch also rescues the class bully (Tim Rossovich) after two former high school outcasts (Tom Villard and Glenn Morshower) bury him in the sand just as the tide starts to come in. And then Mitch and Gayle go back to the Buchanan house and do it like it’s prom night.

Fortunately, Hobie is gone for the weekend. (It’s kind of funny how Hobie is always off with relatives or friends whenever Mitch needs the house to himself.) I will say that, as a child of divorce, there’s nothing more painful than thinking your parents are going to get back together just because one of them was still in the house when you woke up in the morning. Hobie is spared the trauma of Mitch and Gaye’s post-reunion hook-up.

Mitch, however, is disappointed to learn that Gayle has a boyfriend and that she’s going to be marrying him. The only reason Gayle went to the reunion was to work out her feelings about Mitch. Hasselhoff handles the revelation with his trademark emotional earnestness. Left unmentioned is the fact that having sex with Mitch apparently convinced Gayle that she should marry the other guy.

Finally, someone left a baby in Eddie’s lifeguard station. Eddie and Shauni looked after it for the weekend. This led to a lot of, “Wow, sometimes babies smell bad,” humor. In the end, the baby’s father shows up to get the baby but it turns out that he doesn’t actually have custody and that his ex-wife left the baby at the lifeguard station specifically to keep her safe from him. Obviously, this couple has issues that will not be resolved by a high school reunion hook-up.

Even by the standards of Baywatch, this was a remarkably empty episode. Between Mitch quickly getting over the fact that Gayle is getting remarried and Eddie and Shauni taking care of a random baby, it was hard to escape the feeling that nothing really matters on this show. There are no real consequences to anyone’s actions. No one has any sort of emotional conflict that can’t be solved with a musical montage. Eddie and Shauni end the episode thinking about what it would like to be parents. They’ll be over it in a week.

Baywatch was a show where nothing really mattered and that’s probably why it was so popular.

Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Tuesdays, I will be reviewing Baywatch Nights, a detective show that ran in Syndication from 1995 to 1997. The entire show is currently streaming on You tube!

This week, season one comes to a close.

Episode 1.22 “Heat Rays”

(Dir by Peter Roger Hunt, originally aired on May 18th, 1996)

The first season wraps up with an episode that doesn’t really add up too much.

As was typical of the latter half of this show’s first season, this episode actually tells two separate stories. In the first one, Donna is stopped while driving at night by three panicked people on a bridge. They say that their friend is in the water below. Donna jumps into the ocean, just to discover that it was all a trick to steal her car.

Donna floats around for a while. She passes the time by talking to herself. To be honest, she holds up surprisingly well for someone who is stranded in the middle of the ocean. Eventually, a boat stops to help her. Unfortunately, the two men on the boat are drug dealers and, when they’re both shot by a bunch of guys on a bigger boat, it’s up to Donna to save them and get them to dry land.

That may sound like an intriguing storyline but, oddly enough, it gets abandoned fairly quickly. I kept waiting for Donna’s storyline to somehow intersect with the other storyline but it never did. No one even thought to say, “Hey, where’s Donna?” If I was Donna, I would be pretty mad about that.

As for the other storyline, it features Mitch, Garner, and Ryan investigating a series of murders and attempted murders that all involve the members of an old surf band called The Heat Rays. It ultimately turns out that they’re being targeted by the daughter (Christa Sauls) of a woman (played by Judy Geeson) who was raped by several members of the band.

Again, that may sound like a storyline that has the potential to be intriguing. And there is an interesting subtext to the story, as Mitch and Garner are forced to admit that their favorite band wasn’t as innocent and wholesome as they chose to remember. But, in typical Baywatch Nights fashion, the story was a bit too predictable to really work. It was easy to figure out who the murderer was because there was really only one suspect from the start.

This episode had a violent streak just felt out of place. Baywatch Nights, in both its first season and its supernatural-themed second season, was essentially a goofy detective show starring David Hasselhoff. Having multiple people die over the course of one episode just didn’t feel right for such a lightweight show. Some shows are meant to be violent. Some shows are at their best when they embrace their inherent silliness. Baywatch Nights is the latter type of show.

So much for the first season. Unfortunately, the show never really found a consistent identity or style during the first season. However, that would change with the second season.

We’ll find out how next week!