Baywatch is coming back to TV.
The iconic ’90s show, which ran in syndication for a decade and was watched by millions upon millions of people all over the world, is now being revived in a new version at Fox.
A report in Variety says the network has hired Lara Olsen to be the showrunner of this updated Baywatch, which has this plot synopsis:
Daring ocean rescues, pristine beaches, and iconic red bathing suits are back, along with a whole new generation of Baywatch lifeguards, who navigate complicated, messy personal lives in this action-packed reboot that demonstrates there’s the family you’re born into and the family you find.
As long as they have the red bathing suits…
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This is not the first time someone has tried to update Baywatch for modern audiences. In 2017, Paramount released a big-screen Baywatch with an A-list cast including Dwayne Johnson and Zac Efron. The film was made as a kind of winking comic sendup of the old show, which followed the soap operatic lives of a crew of California lifeguards led by the ageless David Hasselhoff. Unfortunately the film wound up being just as bad if not worse than the show is was making fun of. As I wrote in my review from seven years ago…
There’s a lot of poking fun at the cheesiness of the Baywatch TV show, like the one-piece red bathing suits and the characters jogging in slow-motion. But you know what they say about people in glass houses, and the comedy in the Baywatch movie is anything but cutting edge. It mostly consists of Johnson calling Efron names, [Jon] Bass fumbling over his words around [Kelly] Rohrbach, some R-rated profanity, and one sequence in which Efron has to examine a murdered man’s genitals for clues.
We’ll see whether the new Baywatch chooses to emulate the old show, make fun of it, or go for a little of both. Personally, I would rather see an update of Baywatch Nights, the insane spinoff show where David Hasselhoff joined a detective agency and solved paranormal mysteries.