Lisa Vanderpump | Through the Shattered Lens

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, an detective show that ran in Syndication from 1995 to 1997. The entire show is currently streaming on Youtube!

This week, Mitch and Ryan go undercover!

Episode 1.5 “Just A Gigolo”

(Dir by Martin Pasetta, originally aired on October 28th, 1995)

David Hasselhoff is a gigolo!

No, not really. Mitch may be wearing sunglasses and speaking broken French but that’s just because he has gone undercover as a con artist. He’s trying to expose the actual gigolo, a younger man named Grant Styles (Joel Beeson). Grant swindled a good deal of money from Mitch’s friend, Julie (Candy Clark), but, because Julie voluntarily handed over the money and told Grant that he didn’t have to pay her back, no crime was committed.

“To catch a gigolo,” Mitch tells us, “I decided to become a gigolo.” This is followed by a lengthy exercise montage. Finally, after a week of lifting weights and jogging on the beach, Mitch is ready to make his debut at the local country club. Accompanying him is Ryan (Angie Harmon), who is pretending to be a wealthy divorcee. (Mitch’s aunt agrees to allow Ryan to use her mansion.) Grant immediately starts hitting on Ryan and Mitch can only watch as Ryan flirts back. Mitch actually starts to feel jealous and Ryan, for her part, starts to feel jealous whenever she sees Mitch flirting with the older women at the club. Could Mitch and Ryan be falling in love?

Actually, Mitch and Ryan do kind of make a cute couple. I mean, seriously, they just look like they belong together. From the first episode of this series, David Hasselhoff and Angie Harmon have had a playful chemistry and their personalities definitely compliment each other. These two definitely need to get together.

For now, though, the important thing is exposing Grant and his “manager,” Margo Curtis (future reality star Lisa Vanderpump). Though Mitch can’t stand the idea of Grant spending time with Ryan, he still has to do things like stand perfectly still while Grant beats him up because fighting back would apparently blow his cover. (To be honest, I think the only reason the fight scene was included was so Hasselhoff could look directly at the camera and do a “Why me?” shrug.) After Grant beats up Julie, Mitch and Ryan realize that Grant is far more dangerous than the average gigolo. After Grant, while flying a paraglider, tries to shoot Mitch on the beach, Mitch and Ryan trick him into breaking into Ryan’s mansion so that he can be captured and sent away.

While all of this is going on, Garner (Gregory Alan Williams) and Destiny (Lisa Stahl) worked together to catch a notorious bail jumped named Bobby Bahama (Jeff Dashnaw). Most bail jumpers would probably try to leave the state but Bobby jumps bail and then decides to just keep hanging out at the beach and his favorite club. Destiny meets Bobby at the club, invites him to her hotel room, and then handcuffs him to the bed.

“Kinky,” Bobby says.

No, Bobby, the term is “captured.”

I enjoyed this episode, not so much for the basic plot but for the chemistry between Angie Harmon and David Hasselhoff. Like I said earlier, they’re an appealing couple and they have a fun chemistry whenever they’re acting opposite each other. Any show that features David Hasselhoff pretending to be a gigolo is going to have a bizarre appeal to it but Mitch’s relationship with Ryan was strong enough that not even a rather silly storyline could sabotage it.

I normally don’t talk about the thumbnail used on a video. However, It would be perfectly natural for someone to look at that thumbnail and think they are about to watch a music video remake of Casablanca (1942) with Martin Fry playing Bogart. It’s not too far off. I would add that it also seems to take place in a lost Rainer Werner Fassbinder film.

When I watch this music video I get the distinct feeling that I am missing previous chapters in this story of three different guys that become enraptured with the same woman. This also isn’t too far off. I haven’t listened to the whole album, called The Lexicon of Love, but I know enough to say that I am kind of missing other installments in this tale. Wikipedia tells me that while it is not a concept album, it does have repeated themes that revolve around heartache. This also makes sense seeing as several of the songs off of the album have names like The Look of Love, All of My Heart, and Valentine’s Day. A longform music video was even made called Mantrap. Still, you don’t have to have heard the whole album, or have seen the other music videos that were made for songs on the album in order to enjoy this one.

I mentioned before that there are three different characters who try to get the same woman, but I have to admit that I thought they were the same person till I read the Wikipedia article on the song. It comes across as a guy spotting a woman that he knew while watching a play, disguising himself as a singing telegram to confront her backstage, and then she comes to his nightclub where he confronts her again, only to be literally reduced to a little nothing in her life. I have no doubt that these are supposed to be three different people. I also believe that they had Martin Fry play all of them for a reason. It seems to me that the music video visually hints to the audience that the three different characters come from the same place while the song itself has all three men singing the same song that asks her to shoot the “poison arrow” to their heart. The combination of the two binds them visually and audibly. I’m not sure about the beginning and the end. I could guess, but I’ll just leave that to you. I could be completely wrong about the whole thing.

In the end, it doesn’t matter that much. It is one of the best music videos of the era whether you get exactly what they were going for or not. Director Julien Temple did an excellent job here. It’s no wonder he has done more than a hundred of them. It’s also not a surprise that when ABC decided to make a return recently, they brought Julien Temple back to direct their new music video.

As is often the case, I come to the end of one of these posts, and just as I am ready to leave, I decide to do one more Google search only to find something else worth mentioning. Since I am stubborn, I often stick it at the end where/when I found out about it anyways. Does the woman look familiar? She didn’t to me, but it’s Lisa Vanderpump who would be in several other music videos–including one for Lady Gaga–and the TV Show, The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.

Enjoy!