TV Finally Remembers It’s Supposed to Be Fun | Commentary

Twenty-six seconds into the first trailer for Fox’s “Baywatch” reboot, a plane crashes into a parasail, dragging two screaming girls into the watery abyss. There’s a lot of abs, slow motion and thigh-high swimsuits as the lifeguards literally jump into action. A few seconds later, Noah Beck’s character rides the submerged plane like a kneeboard as his co-worker pulls him on speedboat.

It’s an insane, extravagant trailer that makes you question what the hell you just watched. And it’s exactly what TV’s been missing.

For the past decade and a half, so many shows have felt like they’ve been chasing in the footsteps of “Breaking Bad,” pushing the envelope of cable, broadcast and later streaming to tell more cinematic stories. More often than not, “cinematic” has been code for “bummer” as an increasing number of networks unveiled shows of varying quality about conflicted, navel-gazing antiheroes. TV shows being described as multi-hour movies became such a pervasive trend in the 2010s and early 2020s that “BoJack Horseman” mocked the description with a tongue-in-cheek letter to TV critics from its showrunner character Flip McVicker in Season 5.

But while great storytelling has always existed on television, the joy of the medium has long coincided with its wild swings and borderline insanity. There’s a reason why the phrase “jumping the shark” — used to describe the moment when a show, movie or franchise does something so unhinged that it signals an often permanent decline in quality — originated from Henry Winkler’s Fonzie jumping over a live shark on “Happy Days.”

More than film, TV is meant for water cooler conversations. It’s meant for shocked tweets and TikToks as well as rushed texts to friends about how you can’t believe what you just witnessed.

After years of “9-1-1,” “Outer Banks,” “Grey’s Anatomy” and Nathan Fielder holding down the WTF forts, that chaotic and joyful energy has blissfully reemerged on television this year.

It was there in HBO’s “A Knight of Seven Kingdoms,” a fart joke-laden comedy set in the world of “Game of Thrones.” The joy of the medium was there in Peacock’s “The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins,” a comedy that Indiewire’s Ben Travers said “goes a long way toward filling the void” of NBC’s heyday of must-see TV. It was there in Prime Video’s “Sterling Point,” a young-adult series that The Guardian’s Micha Frazer-Carroll described by noting, “If escapism is the brief, then ‘Sterling Point’ fulfills it expertly.”

And — of course — fun, wild WTF moments defined the sweeping comedy of the year, Apple TV’s “Widow’s Bay.” The horror comedy, which has been described as “the kind of magic trick that shouldn’t by any means work” and of “striking a tone that feels genuinely new” was so acclaimed that it won 14 Emmys this year for its first season, beating longtime Outstanding Comedy Series leader “Hacks.”

And it did so without being a huge bummer.

Is this all to say that 2027’s “Baywatch” will be the next “Widow’s Bay?” Of course not. But it’s about time that TV once again embraces its fun side. Not everything needs to be “important” or even “good.” Sometimes you just want to watch a lifeguard diving into a flaming ocean.

The post TV Finally Remembers It’s Supposed to Be Fun | Commentary appeared first on TheWrap.

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