Retro Television Review: Baywatch 1.1 “In Deep”

Posted on October 11, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

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 purchased on Tubi.

This week, Hobie’s a snitch!

Episode 1.1 “In Deep”

(Dir by Peter H. Hunt, originally aired on September 22nd, 1989)

Hobie, you idiot!

Mitch’s young son is spending the summer with his father and he’s supposed to be concentrating on summer school. Instead, he hanging out with two older guys, Scott (Christopher Murphy) and Ron (Lance Gilbert), and basically letting himself be used as a slave in return for jet ski lessons.

Mitch is not a fan of jet skis. They’re unregulated and they’re dangerous, he says. As if to prove Mitch’s point, Scott collides with a windjammer! The woman on the windjammer is killed. (Craig and Eddie pull her body out of the ocean, which is the type of sad thing that Baywatch would eventually stop featuring.) Hobie, realizing Scott is guilty, tries to find the evidence to prove it and nearly gets himself killed as a result. Fortunately, Mitch is able to save him and Scott is arrested. I have to say that, after this episode, I kind of found myself agreeing with Mitch’s ex-wife. The beach is too dangerous!

Meanwhile, Craig caught Eddie sleeping in his lifeguard tower and realized that Eddie, who I assume is getting paid to be a lifeguard, doesn’t have a home. Did he ever have a home? Has he been sleeping on the beach all this time? How did he apply for Lifeguard School without an address? Anyway, Craig takes Eddie back to his Venice loft, where Craig’s wife (now played by Holly Gagnier, replacing the pilot’s Gina Hecht) decides that they should let Eddie rent their storage room. It’s even got a view of the beach, if you ignore all the other buildings in the way and instead just find that one unobstructed alley to look down. (Actually, Eddie finding and looking down that alley was cute and likable. He was so excited!) I have to say that, for a lawyer, Craig’s loft really sucked. It was pretty impressive for a lifegaurd, though.

The other big development this week is that Garner Ellerbee (Gregory Alan Williams) made his first appearance as the beach cop who hates sand. (Then why become a beach cop?) He and Mitch appear to be old friends. Little do they know that they will eventually open up a detective agency together.

This episode was predictable but the cast was super likable. The earnestness of it all carried the day.

Retro Television Review: Baywatch: Panic At Malibu Pier

Posted on October 4, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Today, I start a new series of reviews. Since I already did Baywatch Nights, it just made sense to go ahead and do Baywatch. All together, this show ran for 11 and a movie so it should only take 241 weeks to finish up the series….

“Baywatch: Panic At Malibu Pier”

(Dir by Richard Compton, originally aired on April 29th, 1989)

It’s not easy being a lifeguard.

That would seem to be the main theme running through Panic at Malibu Pier, the two-hour movie that also served as a pilot for Baywatch. Consider the drama:

Mitch Buchanan (David Hasselhoff) loves the beach and he loves getting in the water but it’s cost him his marriage and now, his ex-wife (Wendie Malick) is suing for sole custody of their young son, Hobie (Brandon Call). Hobie doesn’t like going to school. He doesn’t understand why he can’t just spend all day on the beach like his father. Mitch, meanwhile, has been promoted to lieutenant of Baywatch and he’s now no longer supposed to do rescues. He’s just supposed to supervise the other lifeguard. His boss, Captain Thorpe (Monte Markham), is very insistent on that. Mitch explains that he doesn’t even like wearing socks. Ewwww. You have to wear socks, Mitch!

Eddie Kramer (Billy Warlock) is a rookie lifeguard. He finished at the top of his class but he’s also a tough kid from Philadelphia who grew up in the foster system. Shauni (Erika Eleniak) is another rookie lifeguard who freezes up when she has to provide CPR to a drowned girl. Her mentor, Jill (Shawn Weatherly), tells Shauni that it happens to every lifeguard. I bet it’s never happened to Mitch. Shauni seems to have a crush on Eddie and Eddie seems to be driven to prove himself. Eddie has guts because he wears a Philadelphia t-shirt in California.

Al Gibson (Richard Jaeckel) is the veteran lifeguard who is reaching retirement age and who dies at the end of the episode and gets a big lifeguard funeral on the beach.

Trevor (Peter Phelps) is the Australian lifeguard who calls everyone “mate.”

Finally, Craig Pomeroy (Parker Stevenson) is the attorney who prefers to spend his time in his lifeguard tower. Even when he should be at the office and working for his clients, Craig just hangs out at his tower. He saves the life of a disturbed teenager named Laurie (Madchen Amick). Laurie subsequently becomes obsessed with him. When the married Craig tells her to stay out of his lifeguard tower and stop taking off all of her clothes, she accuses Craig of assaulting her. Later, she tries to murder Craig’s wife (Gina Hecht). This all could have been avoided if Craig had just gone to his office like he was supposed to.

This pilot film for Baywatch has everything that the show would make famous — stiff line deliveries from the supporting cast, red swimsuits, David Hasselhoff’s earnestly goofy sincerity, slow motion, and plenty of musical montages. Amongst the guest cast, Madchen Amick stands out at the obsessive Laurie, showing an ability for handling melodrama that would be put to good use on Twin Peaks. Take a drink every time Mitch says, “Rescue can,” and see how long you can go before passing out. Unlike a lot of pilots that don’t really resemble the eventual show, Panic at Malibu Pier is unmistakably Baywatch.

And, watching it, you can see why the show eventually became a success. The beach scenery is nice. The men are athletic, the women are pretty, and the slow motion is cool the first time you see it. Of course, the most important thing about the pilot — and the show itself — is that it doesn’t require a good deal of attention. It’s one of those things where you can step away from the screen for a few minutes and then come back without having worry about having missed anything important.

Panic at Malibu Pier was a ratings hit. Baywatch followed. We’ll get into that next week.

Final Voyage (1999, directed by Jim Wynorski)

Posted on May 27, 2025 by Jedadiah Leland

Aaron (Dylan Walsh) has been hired to sever as a bodyguard for spoiled heiress Gloria (Erika Eleniak) while she takes a cruise. Things go wrong when Josef (Ice-T) and Max (Claudia Christian) hijack the cruise. They think that they’ll make a fortune by taking everyone hostage and searching the boat. Little do they know that the boat is very slowly sinking. (They would known except they killed the engineers when they first took over.) Aaron and Gloria have to defeat the terrorists before the boat sinks.

Imagine Die Hard or Under Siege made not with expensive special effects but instead with a healthy supply of stock footage and built not around proven action stars like Bruce Willis and Steven Seagal but instead around the charisma-free Dylan Walsh and you have a pretty good idea why Final Voyage is one of the more forgettable movies to be ripped off from either one of those two films. At least Dylan Walsh has the excuse of being miscast. Erika Eleniak actually was in Under Siege and still seems clueless as to what she’s supposed to be doing during Final Voyage. Ice-T is an amusing villain and the movie opens with a gunfight on an airplane that is so poorly choreographed and improbable that it becomes entertaining to watch. Otherwise, Final Voyage is a cruise best not taken.

This is a Jim Wynorski film so there’s plenty of gratuitous bra and cleavage shots for those who are specifically looking for that. Jim Wynorski definitely has a style and he manages to bring it to every film that he makes, even when it doesn’t really make sense for the story being told. Give Wynorski this, he understands why people are watching his movies.

Retro Television Review: Broken Angel (dir by Richard T. Heffron)

Posted on May 19, 2024 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Sundays, I will be reviewing the made-for-television movies that used to be a primetime mainstay. Today’s film is 1988’s Broken Angel! It can be viewed on YouTube.

Chuck Coburn (William Shatner) has a nice house in the suburbs, a nice job, a nice car, and a nice Bruins jacket. He’s hoping that he can once against have a nice marriage with his wife (Susan Blakely), despite the fact that she cheated on him and she still thinks that he spends too much time at work.

Chuck is proud of his teenage daughter, Jaime (Erika Eleniak). Jaime seems like the perfect suburban and angelic teenager. But then Jaime goes to prom and her best friend, Jenny (Amy Lynne), is gunned down in front of her. Jaime runs from the scene and vanishes. As Chuck searches for his daughter, he is stunned discover that Jaime, Jenny, and their boyfriends were all a part of a gang! His perfect daughter was smoking weed, doing cocaine, selling crack, and taking part in rumbles with a rival Asian gang. Even worse, Jaime’s gang was called …. LFN!

LFN? That stands for Live For Now. The Live For Now Gang. Whenever we see the members of the gang preparing to get into a fight with another gang, they all chant, “LFN! LFN!” LFN is a gang of white suburban teenagers and they look just as dorky as they sound. I mean, I think it would be bad enough to discover that your child is in a gang but discovering they were in a dorky gang would probably make it even worse.

The majority of Broken Angel is made up of scenes of Chuck searching the mean streets of Los Angeles. He partners with a social worker (Roxann Dawson) who is herself a former gang member. Chuck discovers that his daughter’s street name was — *snicker* — Shadow. He also befriend a member of the LFN’s rival Asian gang and tries to encourage her to go straight. This leads to scene in which he is attacked by Al Leong. Somehow, middle-aged William Shatner manages to beat up Al Leong. That, in itself, is worth the cost of admission.

Broken Angel deals with a serious issue but it does so in such an overwrought and melodramatic fashion that most viewers will be moved not to tears but to laughter. In Broken Angel, William Shatner gave the type of overly dramatic and self-serious performance that he routinely pokes fun at today. If you’re one of those people who enjoys listening as Shatner emphasize random syllables and takes meaningly pauses, this movie will give you a lot to enjoy. In every scene, Shatner seems to be saying, “Notice me, Emmy voters! Notice me!” Of course, it wouldn’t be until Shatner learned how to laugh at himself that the Emmy voters would finally notice him.

The film ends on an abrupt note but with the promise of better days ahead. Just remember — keep an eye out for the LFN!