Blu-Ray/TV Series Review: Baywatch Hawaii: Season 1/Baywatch Season 10

 

Baywatch Hawaii is mostly a spin-off show from the original Baywatch series, which aired for nine seasons and partly a tenth season. The first season consisted of 22 episodes that aired during the 1999-2000 TV season. The cast was mostly new, but it did bring over Brooke Burns, Michael Bergen, Michael Newman, and, of course, David Hasselhoff from the parent series. Hoff still received top billing in the show and Newman was credited as a series regular, but both of them were really recurring characters that would appear here and there, but they were not in every episode. Hoff mainly acted as a producer on the series. He was featured in the first episode and then appeared in a few more before basically disappearing until the end of the season. Simone Mackinnon (who appeared in the Australian episodes in the parent series) was also brought on as a series regular. The new cast members include Brandy Ledford, Jason Brooks, Stacy Kamano, and Jason Momoa (in his first acting role).

The show continues the format of a procedural prime-time soap opera that worked for the parent series. There were a few story threads, especially in the last 1/3 of the season, that flowed from episode to episode, but most of the storylines were limited to a single episode. The basic plotline is that Mitch moves to Hawaii after the events that ended the original series, as he is basically going through a midlife crisis. He almost ends up botching a rescue (as a private citizen) and then works to set up a lifeguard training center to bring in and train lifeguards from all around the world in different techniques that they can bring back home.  

The blu-ray set is a four-disc set with the episodes spread evenly throughout the discs. The set is imported from Germany, so you need a Region 2 or Region-free blu-ray player in order to watch them. The menus are in German and the audio track on the episodes defaults to German. But you can switch to the English audio track from your player's settings. There are not any English captions, however. The discs include the remasted episodes and the non-remasted standard-definition versions of the episodes (which allows you to see the boost in A/V quality of the remasted episodes over the non-remastered episodes). All of the bonus content is on the fourth disc. That includes trailers for some of the episodes and the series itself, and a short (about 8 minutes long) making-of featurette that is mostly an interview with Hoff about moving the series to Hawaii and then includes interview snippets from a couple other cast members. 

Overall, the series is okay. It has a similar (but not the same) feel as the parent series in terms of style and tone. It is definitely a prime-time soap opera that can get a bit cheesy. Of course, the cast is ridiculously good-looking, and the show takes advantage of that fact, having the cast members wear as little as possible most of the time. The show does not get as many notable guest stars as the parent series got. This season, the only recognizable guest stars are Jeremy Jackson (reprising his role as Hobie for a single episode) and Pamela Bach (who was still married to Hoff at the time), playing yet another character (her third different character) between the two series. The show is enjoyable and worth watching as long as you don't expect it to be anything more than it is.