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!

Tonight, we start the second season of Baywatch Nights!  It’s like an entirely new show!

Episode 2.1 “Terror Of The Deep”

(Dir by Gregory J. Bonnan, originally aired on September 29th, 1996)

The second season begins with a few changes.

The open titles are now dark and atmospheric, featuring David Hasselhoff walking through the fog.  Lou Rawls’s theme song has been replaced by a creepy but very danceable instrumental track.

Mitch, Ryan, Eddie, and Donna are all back but Garner is no longer listed in the opening credit.  Nor is he mentioned in tonight’s episode.  Instead, Mitch’s new best friend is a world traveler named Diamont Teague (Dorian Gregory).  Diamont is an expert on the paranormal.  He believes that the truth is out there.  Donna spots Diamont walking along the pier and immediately mentions how mysterious is.

No mention of Mitch being a private detective is made during the second season premiere.  Instead, this episode open with Mitch doing lifeguard things.  He rescues a woman who is discovered floating in the ocean.  The woman screams in terror after she’s resuscitated.  Diamont thinks that the woman might be a survivor of a freighter that sunk a few days previously.  Diamont also thinks that the freighter was taken down by a tentacled monster that lives in the ocean.

Largely to prove his friend wrong, Mitch recruits Eddie and Ryan to help him track down and explore the freighter.  While Ryan remains on their boat and stays in communication via radio, Eddie and Mitch dive into the ocean and explore the freighter.  Guess what? Diamont was right!  There is a tentacled monster living inside the freighter and now, it’s after Eddie and Mitch!

With this episode, Baywatch Nights totally changed directions, going from being a detective show to a somewhat goofy rip-off of The X-Files.  For the most part, the second season of Baywatch Nights was a lot of fun but you wouldn’t necessarily know it from this episode.  Terror of the Deep takes place almost entirely underwater, with Mitch and Eddie spending most of their time in wet suits that make it very difficult to figure out which one is which.  The underwater scenes are also rather darkly lit, which I assume was done to both create atmosphere and also disguise the fact that the tentacled monster wasn’t really that impressive.  However, the scenes are often so dark that it becomes difficult to tell what is actually happening on screen.  This was an episode with a simple plot that often felt incoherent because I was never quite sure where Mitch and Eddie were in the freighter or if they were even still together.

This episode also overlooks the fact that one of the best things about the first season was the playful chemistry between David Hasselhoff and Angie Harmon.  Instead, we get Mitch swimming with Eddie while Ryan stays on board the boat and is reduced to saying, “Copy that,” over and over again.  This episode really did end up feeling like a lost opportunity.

But no worries!  The rest of the second season is going to be a lot of fun.  For instance, next week, Mitch faces off against a killer mermaid!  It should be entertaining.