The beauty of form

Critics dismiss Baywatch as a jiggle show whose primary appeal is to straight men. But the show revels in equal-opportunity sexual objectification. The men on the show expose more flesh than the women, who wear one-piece swimsuits. The camera often zooms in at crotch level for admiring close-ups of the men's, um, packages. I suspect straight women and gay men enjoy looking over the rugged Hasselhoff, David Chokachi, and Jaason Simmons as much as straight men and perhaps lesbians enjoy looking over Lee, Yasmine Bleeth, Gina Lee Nolin, and Alexandra Paul. The classic Baywatch shot -- someone running toward the camera in slow motion, every muscle straining against wet clothing, every loose appendage bouncing -- shows off these perfect bodies to their fullest advantage.

The physical perfection of the Baywatch cast is almost eerie. First, there's Hasselhoff, who plays Mitch. He is now in his 40s and looks exactly the same as he did in Knight Rider more than a decade ago. Then there's Lee, who boasts two of the most awe-inspiring monuments to human engineering since the pyramids at Gizeh. Thanks to surgery, she's literally larger than life. And then the rest, including a cast of extras who are perhaps the only beachgoers outside of Revere who come to the shore fully styled and made up.

To appease viewers who see the cast as genetic freaks, there are two relatively normal-looking characters. One is Jeremy Jackson as Hobie, Mitch's teenage son. Moderately rebellious but basically a good kid, cute but not threateningly so, he's a worthy object of emulation for boys in the audience and of teen-idol worship for the girls. The other is Stephanie Holden, played by Paul, who is athletic but not outrageously curvy, older but not ancient, androgynous but not threateningly so -- ah, there's that lesbian appeal again.

Anyway, sex is only part of the show's overall fantasy, which is about lifestyle, the same California fantasy of sun, fun, youth, and water sports that the Beach Boys sell. And "sell" is the operative word, since the lifestyle is unthinkable without the proper accessories, which the camera fetishizes as much as it does the bodies, and whose manufacturers are thanked at the end of each episode. This fantasy of unfettered capitalism and consumption is what sells the show, and what the show sells, around the world.

At the same time, Baywatch offers a surprisingly bleak view of Los Angeles life. The lifeguards would have nothing to do, after all, if there were no danger. The characters have faced more plagues and disasters than the Egyptians: fires, floods, earthquakes, pollution, assorted criminals -- every threat faced by the real Los Angeles except for police brutality and extended celebrity murder trials. Plus, there is always some insolent beachgoer who fails to respect the awesome power of the ocean until the lifeguards rescue him. Our moral guides, the lifeguards respect the ocean so much that Mitch apparently named his son after a catamaran. In short, viewers get to indulge their fantasies of hedonism while simultaneously reveling in their moral superiority over those whom God or Mother Nature punishes for living out those fantasies.

If Baywatch's ability to have it both ways weren't proof enough of genius, there's its form. It's essentially one long music video, with more disjunctive juxtapositions and quick-cut edits in each episode than in Natural Born Killers or the entire run of Miami Vice. There's no invasive plotting to get in the way of the musical montages, the action sequences, or the soap-operatic romantic couplings -- again, something for everyone. Baywatch has quietly but decisively altered the structure of TV drama, much as the Beach Boys did to the pop song with Pet Sounds. Let's hope David Hasselhoff doesn't have to endure complete mental and physical collapse, à la Brian Wilson, before his brilliance is recognized.