BAYWATCH is back.
Like an out-of-his-depth surfer dude on Venice Beach, the sun, sea and CPR saga is being hauled on to shore and resuscitated for a brand new series.
Sydney Sweeney, is being seen as an early front-runner to take on Pamela Anderson’s role[/caption]
Pamela as CJ Parker doing her famous beach run[/caption]
US TV network Fox has ordered a dozen new episodes of the show that thrust Pamela Anderson, Carmen Electra and all the other hubba-hubba hotties in David Hasselhoff’s ludicrous lifeguard squad into more than a BILLION homes.
And fans of the series, cruelly kicked off the air in 2001 after 11 sun-drenched years, will only have to wait until next year to be back on the world’s most treacherous pleasure beach.
Unveiling the reboot, Fox announced — to some sighs of relief from true Baywatch devotees — that creators Michael Berk, Greg Bonann and Doug Schwartz will once again be running the show that turned the slow-motion swimsuit run into a work of art.
The multi-million-dollar reboot’s goal, Fox said, is to “reconnect with existing fans while also introducing a new generation to the world of these famous lifeguards.”
And, no doubt, to banish the ghouls of 2017’s excruciating “comedy” movie version.
That Pacific-sized turkey, starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Zac Efron and Priyanka Chopra, sank like a leaky lilo.
Producers have spent the past seven years trying to get the next instalment right, with fans convinced it was dead in the water as writers struggled to come up with any decent ideas.
Now they seem to have found their sea legs and in a breathless statement, Fox declared its new TV series will feature “all the adrenalin-fuelled rescues, tangled relationships, complicated chemistry and beachside heroics that defined the original — now with an entirely new cast, contemporary trappings, tensions and challenges, and a renewed mission to protect Southern California’s shoreline”.
No new cast members have been revealed, but Hollywood’s current golden girl, Sydney Sweeney, is being seen as an early front-runner.
And it is no secret as to why that might be.
After all, Baywatch’s appeal was less down to The Hoff’s character Mitch Buchannon and more to do with the very buoyant assets of Pammie, who as Casey Jean “CJ” Parker became the Nineties’ biggest sex symbol and flogger of a trillion teenage bedroom posters.
Sassy Sydney, with her “good jeans” and even more impressive top, is surely the small-screen successor to Pammie.
They tried to get my kids to talk me into it. They said they’d give them producer credits.
I mean, they were trying everything
Pammie
Certainly Pammie herself, now make-up free and fed up of her blonde bimbo image that she once unwittingly cultivated, seems unlikely to return.
She did have a cameo in the Baywatch movie — in slow motion, natch — but her affection for the show has waned.
Indeed, so fed up is she now of her time getting all that Californian sand stuck between her toes that she even snubbed a talking head slot in last year’s Hulu documentary After Baywatch: Moment In The Sun.
Producers were desperate to get her onside but she was having none of it, saying recently: “They begged everybody around me.
“They tried to get my kids to talk me into it. They said they’d give them producer credits.
“I mean, they were trying everything.
HUNKS IN TRUNKS
“And I said, ‘No, I really don’t want to go backwards’.”
But, of course, she wasn’t alone in making Baywatch the phenomenal hit it became — for many, like the 14-year-old me, it was Erika Eleniak, the show’s Shauni McClain, who guaranteed our full attention.
Erika, as students of the California-born actress will know, came to Baywatch in a similar fashion to Pammie — via Playboy magazine, where in 1989, the year before her Baywatch adventure began, she was a much celebrated Playmate.
Another bottle blonde beach babe, Erika and her smouldering looks were unforgettable, not least in the Baywatch montage to end all Baywatch montages, soundtracked by Roxette’s The Look.
Then there was model Yasmine Bleeth’s Caroline Holden, a sizzling brunette who I’m convinced would induce 83 per cent of men to fake a shark injury for, if there was even a slim chance she would come charging out to rescue them with that torpedo buoy.
Of course, it wasn’t just the girls who set pulses racing during the show’s epic 242-episode run, which saw the last two seasons move to Hawaii.
Baywatch had more six-packs in it than there were in Homer Simpson’s refrigerator.
David Charvet and Billy Warlock were just two of the hunks in trunks who guaranteed Baywatch had eye candy for all.
Even David Hasselhoff, stripped of his Knight Rider leather, scrubbed up well, a hirsute hero who glued the often shaky show together.
Because that was the thing about Baywatch — the acting was generally appalling and the plots bordering on ridiculous.
A typical episode would revolve around some hard-bodied 20-something suddenly — and implausibly — finding themselves struggling on a millpond ocean, roughly ten feet out from the shore.
Baywatch’s real appeal was its hot bodies and hot sands — the endless summer of a Californian beach where everyone was beautiful — even when gasping for breath having just narrowly avoided being Jaws’s teatime snack. It was camp, it was silly — and it knew it.
For millions of us in Britain, wedged on our sofas on a Saturday night, rain pelting at the windows, trays of chicken kievs and potato waffles on our laps, it was the escapism we needed.
The big question now is will the new series manage to recapture that magic in ways that the misfiring Baywatch movie failed to do?
All Fox’s talk of “contemporary trappings, tensions and challenges” rings alarm bells.
As television continues to bend over backwards to the cult of woke, will Baywatch 2026 become another victim and, ahem, wave goodbye to everything that made it good in the first place?
WOKE-WASHING
Can twitchy Hollywood executives countenance a bevy of bikini-clad beauties doing the kind of swimsuit slow-mo that thrilled 1.1billion global viewers in the original programme?
And who will be in these new bikinis — will they even be actual women?
Baywatch’s reboot would be wise to steer clear of woke-washing an already successful format if it is to survive the choppy waters of modern-day, pressure group-infused TV.
So, Michael Berk, Greg Bonann and Doug Schwartz, the beachball is in your court.
When your beloved Baywatch series sets sail on to an all-new ocean what’s it gonna be — waving . . . or drowning?
