Like the end of a slo-mo music montage on the beach, “Baywatch” reboot has found a home: Fox has closed on a script+penalty deal for a new version of the long-running surf-sand-and-saviors series from Fremantle.
Fox and Fremantle have tapped Lara Olsen (“Spinning Out”) to serve as showrunner for the new “Baywatch,” which was originally created by Michael Berk, Douglas Schwartz and Gregory J. Bonann. Starring David Hasselhoff, “Baywatch” originally ran from 1989 to 1999 and then was retooled as “Baywatch” Hawaii” from 1999 to 2001.
Olsen, Berk, Bonann and Schwartz will serve as exec producers on the one-hour drama, which comes from both Fremantle and Fox Entertainment. Here’s the new logline: “Daring ocean rescues, pristinebeaches, andiconic red bathing suitsare back, along with a whole new generation of Baywatch lifeguards, who navigate complicated, messy personal lives in this action-packed reboot that demonstrates there’s the family you’re born into and the family you find.”
This isn’t Fox’s first visit to the lifeguard hut: The network also aired the TV reunion movie “Baywatch: Hawaiian Wedding” in 2003.
Besides Hasselhoff, the show’s cast over the years included Pamela Anderson, Yasmine Bleeth, Alexandra Paul, Erika Eleniak, Nicole Eggert, Parker Stevenson and many others. Hasselhoff also starred in a spinoff series, the private eye drama “Baywatch Nights,” which aired from 1995 to 1997. “Baywatch” was a syndication sensation, airing in more than 145 countries at one point, more than any other TV show. The series’ PR company even made up a stat, calling it the “No. 1 series in the world,” which was then reprinted as fact in publications.
The show was originally inspired by Bonann’s time as a Los Angeles County lifeguard. Bonann later became an Olympics filmmaker and after years of pitching a show about lifeguards, eventually meeting Berk and Schwartz. They originally developed “Baywatch” for Grant Tinker’s GTG shingle, which had a series commitment at CBS. When the Eye network passed, the pilot “Baywatch: Panic at Malibu Pier” was sold to NBC, which aired it as a movie — and in success, picked up a 12-episode season.
“Baywatch” was a flop on NBC, and the producers managed to buy back the rights to the show from GTG in order to produce new first-run episodes in syndication. The producers recruited a variety of investors, including a small distributor, LBS, as well as an earlier version of Fremantle (which had distributed the show internationally and saw the popularity of Hasselhoff in Germany), UK outlet ITV and the Chris-Craft TV station group. All-American TV, run by Scotti Bros. Records, agreed to invest as the show’s guarantor, and then took over as distributor when LBS went bankrupt. Pearson TV later bought All-American; Pearson eventually became a part of FremantleMedia, which was created via a series of mergers by Germany’s Bertelsmann in 2001. (FremantleMedia became Fremantle in 2018.)
And that is the long road to how “Baywatch” ended up a marquee title in the Fremantle library. A “Baywatch” reboot has been discussed in the past; most recently a “Baywatch” film starring Dwayne Johnson and Zac Efron was released in 2017. That movie grossed $178 million globally.
As for Olsen, she’s very familiar with rebooting classic TV franchises, having worked on the revivals of “90210” and “Beauty and the Beast,” both at The CW. Her other credits include “Blood and Treasure,” “Reign,” “Life Unexpected” and “Private Practice.”
