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    Television
    Saturday, September 21, 2024

    ‘Baywatch’ actors look back at series with pride, appreciation

    The sun hasn’t set on “Baywatch,” at least not yet. There’s a new wave that has come to Hulu with the new docuseries “After Baywatch: Moment in the Sun.”

    Some members of the supple cast from the hugely popular series about a team of lifeguards at California’s Malibu Beach (and later Hawaii) are there to tell all after 30 years.

    The show, which ran for 11 seasons, became a pop culture phenomenon with more than 1.1 billion viewers in 142 countries. But it also garnered smug criticism and ridicule.

    “I’ve definitely had a love-hate relationship with the show over the years,” says Nicole Eggert at a press conference in Pasadena, Calif.

    “But it’s been an evolution, and I definitely love it and appreciate it and am proud of it. And I just wanted everybody to see the people for who we all REALLY are, says Eggert, who played Summer Quinn on the show.

    “I see a lot of articles where there’s like — I’ll use myself for example — of me at 19 in my red swimsuit and then me at 52 at the market. And it’s like, ‘What happened to her?’”

    Part of the purpose of Matthew Felker’s docuseries is to reveal what happened to her and other cast members who saved lives while looking gorgeous in their red Speedos.

    The reason the show was such a hit, says Felker, was that it promoted illusion. “It was selling the California dream,” he says.

    “It was selling a lifestyle. Was it an accurate lifestyle? Not really. Because when you come to California, you realize the beaches aren’t really that nice, and the people don’t look like this. But it was escapism, and it was fantasy. And I think that’s why it translated in Europe so well because it was this — this is what America is. It’s this caricature of what America is.”

    Star David Hasselhoff, who played the lifeguard head honcho, invested his own money when the series went into syndication. In a separate interview, he says he thinks there are two reasons the series was so popular around the world.

    “In Europe, it’s the weather,” he says. “They have horrific winters, and it’s a beautiful representation of America. They think all of America’s beaches are like ‘Baywatch.’ Around the world, the Beach Boys sang about sand and surf and sun, and Frankie Avalon did, too. And we all loved the beach, and so does the world.”

    Hasselhoff says that after his NBC fantasy show “Knight Rider” went off the air, he joined the unemployed. “‘Baywatch’ brought me respect,” he confides. “I was not just an actor who got washed off after a very successful show about a talking car. ‘Baywatch’ kept my world notoriety even more in evidence.

    “After ‘Knight Rider,’ my agent said, ‘We’ll get you another series!’ They were quite mistaken. So I went off and pursued my music. And after that seemed to get going in the right direction, along came ‘Baywatch.’ And when they offered me the chance to be an executive producer and have more input into it, I jumped. And it’s given me respect in the community that I never got as Michael Knight on ‘Knight Rider.’”

    While all the lifeguards looked the part, not all of them were seafaring creatures.

    Erika Eleniak, who played Shauni McLaine, remembers, “I was a terrible swimmer. I did have to audition swimming, and they needed to see my level, my advancement, and how much they were going to need to stunt-double me or not.

    So I was not very confident in the water and completely shark phobic. ... I remember one year I did have it in my contract that I was only going to go in up to my knees and come out from my knees.”

    By contrast, Jeremy Jackson, who portrayed Hobie Bucannon, recalls, “I personally got on the show because I was great in the water already — already surfing, boogie boarding, body surfing, a kid from Newport Beach. So they threw me in the pool after they thought they liked me and a few auditions, and asked if I could swim. And I said, ‘Well, what do you want? Backstroke? Breaststroke? Freestyle? What do you want?’”

    Alexandra Paul, who played Lt. Stephanie Holden, was a competitive swimmer, and David Chokachi, who costarred as Cody Madison, was a beach boy from way back.

    “I was lucky enough to grow up on the East Coast, grew up sailing and teaching sailing and swam on a swim team,” he says.

    “And my character was an Olympic swimming hopeful. So auditioning for that — you can’t fake looking like an Olympic swimmer.”

    “‘Baywatch’ kind of created a mold that shaped an era,” says Jackson. “And I believe this documentary breaks that mold. I think it tells the story behind the story. It’s very relatable to right here, right now — and actually shatters a lot of perceptions and gets into the connectivity and the relatability of the humanitarian aspect of people. And connects us all.”

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