Baywatch Nights was the first series that was spun off from the massively popular series, Baywatch. The first season aired during the 1995-1996 TV season and starred David Hasselhoff as Mitch Buchannan and Gregory Alan Williams (billed for some reason as GregAlan Williams in the credits) as Garner Elerbee reprising their characters from the main series, and Angie Harmon (in her first major series role) as Ryan McBride. Early in the season, Lisa Stahl was billed as a series regular, reprising her recurring character from the main series, Destiny. Lou Rawls was also billed as a series regular, playing a totally different character than he played in his guest-starring role in Baywatch. About 1/3 of the way into the season, Stahl left the series and Donna D'Errico and Eddie Cribrian joined as series regulars, playing Donna Marco and Griff Walker respectively.
The premise of the show is that Garner gets tired of being a cop and decides to become a private detective. Mitch is an investor in the business and ends up becoming a partner, along with Ryan. The first season is pretty much a straight crime-drama case-of-the-week procedural, with a different case that was solved by the end of the episode. I would say that the show was not as cheesy as the parent show, but it did have some cheesy moments. And, because it was still set during the events of the parent show with Hasselhoff splitting his time between the two series, the writers had to do things like coming up with excuses for why Hobie would never be home in any scenes set in Mitch's house. The series was mostly stand-alone from the main series, but there was a crossover episode in which Yasmine Bleeth appeared, and Newmie (Michael Newman) appeared in a couple of episodes. The series also brought back Billy Warlock, who was a regular in the first couple of seasons of Baywatch in a guest-starring role. Other notable guest stars this season included Jason Hervey (from The Wonder Years), Michael Winslow (from the Police Academy movies), Geraldo Rivera, Stephen Culp, Carmen Electra (in a totally different role than she would play when she joined the main series), Lisa Boyle, and Christopher Mayer (billed as Chip Mayer) who fans of the Dukes of Hazard will recognize as Vance Duke from "that" season.
This DVD set is a German import and will not play on Region-1 (US and Canada) DVD or Blu-Ray players. I do not believe it is available on DVD in Region-1, so if you want it, you have to get an imported set. You will need either a Region-2 or Region-Free player to watch this if you live in the US. The 22 episodes are spread over six discs, and the sixth disc has the extras. Those include trailers for each episode that would play at the end of each episode to tease what was going to be on the next week's episode, a promotional trailer for the series, and a promotional reel that was made to pitch the series which was narrated by Hasselhoff in character, and featured Hasselhoff, Williams, and Stahl (who was playing a character named Dana, which would eventually turn into Harmon's character). Some of the scenes from the promo reel did make it into one of the regular episodes. All of those extras are in English, and then there are a bunch of trailers for other movies and tv-series that are in German. The DVD menus are all in German (but easy to navigate), and the audio tracks on the episodes default to German, but you can switch to the English language track when you watch the first episode on the disc and it will stay on the English audio track for the rest of the episodes until you eject the disc.
Overall, the first season is okay, but not great. It definitely has the feel of the 90s show and some of the plots that it used would probably not be used in a series today (at least not in the way they were written back then). They also made the weird choice to air what should have been the pilot episode, which introduced the character of Ryan and set up how the group came together, as the 8th episode.
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