By Jonathan Klotz
| Published 27 seconds ago

For one glorious moment in time, Baywatch was the most-watched show on the planet, turning Pamela Anderson, Yasmine Bleeth, and Carmen Electra into stars, but even those three paled compared to the popularity of David Hasselhoff. The star of Knight Rider found the perfect role for his second act as Mitch Buchannon, a veteran lifeguard who often said it was the only job he ever had, but secretly wanted to be a detective.

Baywatch Nights, the 1995 spin-off, let Mitch live his dream as a detective straight out of a 1930s pulp novel, solving murders, finding missing people, battling sea monsters, uncovering an alien conspiracy, exploring a parallel dimension, and even going 20 years into the future. Baywatch Nights is a bizarre fever dream that would never, ever get made today. 

Baywatch Nights Is The Strangest Spinoff In TV History

Baywatch Nights is really two shows: the noir crime thriller of Season 1 and the X-Files knockoff it became in Season 2. Hasselhoff’s Mitch wasn’t the only familiar face. Garner Ellerbee (Gregory Allan Williams), the police officer from Baywatch since the beginning, established a private detective agency and brought in his buddy Mitch to help him, alongside Detective Ryan McBride (Angie Harmon’s debut, known today for Law & Order and Rizzoli and Isles). Legendary musician Lou Rawls not only played the owner of the nightclub that housed the new detective agency, but also performed the opening song, “After the Sun Comes Down,” which played over the opening montage of mostly daylit scenes. 

Right away, fans were incredibly confused when the opening montage had Mitch running in his Baywatch red trunks and then fading in wearing a white Miami Vice-style suit. In 1995. Multiple shots of Hasselhoff behind a car were supposed to remind fans of his time on Knight Rider, but it had nothing in common with the campy, light-hearted show it was spinning off from. Faced with cratering ratings as the first season went on, the studio, The Baywatch Company, retooled into a monster-of-the-week format even further removed from the original beachside drama. 

From Noir Detective To Paranormal Investigator

Season 2 of Baywatch Nights is one of the worst shows to ever make it to air. Or one of the best, in practice, this was close to a 90’s version of Kolchak the Nightstalker. There was no myth arc, no character development, and no real point to the series other than that X-Files was exploding in popularity. The lack of commitment went all the way down to keeping Mitch as a character on Baywatch, making him a lifeguard by day and a paranormal investigator by night. 

Episode 4, “Strike” starts off with Mitch saving a young man from drowning when a strange lightning strike causes the two to start sharing their feelings. Spoiler: he’s an alien, and instead of letting himself be captured by the government, he chooses to go back to his home planet. There’s no ambiguity. There’s a bright, white light, and he fades from sight as he teleports back home. Again, this is a Baywatch spin-off. With aliens. 

A later episode is somehow even stranger: Episode 13, “Frozen Out of Time,” pits Mitch against Vikings, and, of course, it ends with David Hasselhoff getting into a sword fight with a broom. Four episodes later, and the team is hunting down a werewolf. At the same time these episodes are airing, Hasselhoff is still playing Mitch on Baywatch, and somehow the topic of aliens is real, and vampires, and werewolves, and yes, even mummies, never comes up. You’d think “I’m friends with an alien” would make great water cooler conversation at work. 

Baywatch Nights falls solidly into the “so bad it’s good” category. There’s no question that at the time, it was a massive flop and one of the least successful spin-offs of all time. Describing it today will make people question your sanity, and yet, there are more episodes of Baywatch Nights than there is Stranger Things. 

By Robert Scucci
| Updated 32 seconds ago

One of my favorite I Think You Should Leave skits involves a burnt-out cop named Detective Crashmore, portrayed by the late, great Biff Wiff, who doesn’t even care if he dies “because everything has sucked lately.” He kicks down doors and pumps rooms full of lead before rattling off catchphrases like “You f****** suck!” He’s overtly angry, constantly butts heads with his commissioner, and arms himself to the teeth with comically large weapons before getting back to business after tragedy strikes.

While there’s no definitive way for me to prove it, I have reason to believe that Rutger Hauer’s Harley Stone in 1992’s Split Second was the inspiration for Detective Crashmore, because it’s basically the same character, aside from the fact that Split Second isn’t meant to be a parody.

Billed as a dystopian buddy cop science fiction action horror film, Split Second is an over-the-top exercise in swift and brutal justice, as our hero searches for answers in a string of serial slayings that have eluded him for years. While Split Second isn’t necessarily a comedy, Rutger Hauer’s cigar-smoking, coffee-swilling, gun-blasting Harley Stone is so deadpan in his badassery that I can’t help but imagine Biff Wiff studying this movie while preparing for the Tim Robinson sketch I love so much.

“He’ll Need Bigger Guns”

Set in 2008 London, Split Second wastes no time establishing Harley Stone as a hardened homicide detective who shoots first, asks questions later, and operates so firmly in his own lane that nobody can keep up with him or keep him under control on their best day. Coming in hot after his suspension is lifted, Harley is forced to let rookie officer and psychologist Dick Durkin (Neil Duncan) tag along on his investigations and report on any unstable behavior that he exhibits. 

Fortunately for Harley, his insane theory about a serial killer ripping the hearts out of its subjects is proven correct, allowing Dick to brush aside any psychological concerns he may have originally had. All they know is that the killer’s activity is linked to lunar cycles, and may have origins in the supernatural, extraterrestrial, or occult. 

Haunted by the case because the killer claimed the life of his partner, Foster McLaine (Steven Hartley), matters are complicated for Harley when his widowed wife, Michelle McLaine (Kim Cattrall), reenters his life and becomes one of the killer’s targets. With no solid leads to pursue, but every single comically large gun known to man at his disposal, Harley embarks with Dick on a blood-soaked quest to find the killer and end his reign of terror once and for all, making sure there’s plenty of collateral damage along the way. 

Extreme Buddy Cop Energy

Harley and Dick are the ultimate odd couple in Split Second, and their chemistry works better than it has any right to. You don’t get the usual fighting-over-the-radio-station trope here, but watching Dick slowly transform from idealistic rookie to chain-smoking, gun-toting, coffee-chugging badass under Harley’s influence is such a satisfying payoff. As they close in on the killer, they move as one in their efforts to keep Michelle safe and finally crack the case that has been tormenting Harley for years.

Split Second’s violence is my favorite kind of violence because it’s so gratuitous you can’t take it seriously. Blood is bright red and splatters everywhere, hearts are theatrically ripped from chests, pentagrams are carved into bodies, and coffee cups get chugged and tossed with reckless abandon. It’s pulpy and melodramatic, but played completely straight, which makes it impossible not to fall in love with these characters. They’re so accustomed to living in this world that everything they do feels second nature, with zero pretension.

A total VHS-era classic, Split Second is one of those movies you throw on simply because it’s so over-the-top in every conceivable way that you can’t help but love it. Marketed as “Blade Runner meets Alien,” it doesn’t really play like either film, but it’s unique enough in its execution to have real staying power as the low-budget B movie it was always destined to be.

As of this writing, Split Second is currently streaming for free on Tubi.

By Jonathan Klotz
| Published 7 seconds ago

You can tell a lot about someone by asking them their favorite spaceship. Ask 100 sci-fi fans, and you’ll get dozens of different answers ranging from Star Trek’s Enterprise-D and Star Wars’ Millennium Falcon to the more offbeat, including Farscape’s Moya and that one Whovian who insists the TARDIS counts. If you’re lucky, at least one person will choose the truly bizarre Lexx from the offbeat late 90’s series Lexx.

A biomechanical ship that resembles a wingless dragonfly, Lexx is the most powerful weapon of destruction in the two universes. It can talk, achieve ludicrous speeds, and has a tail, all of which put together make it the weirdest ship to ever appear on a sci-fi series. 

The Power To Destroy Planets Used to Find A Date

Lexx (voiced by Tom Gallant) was designed by His Divine Shadow as the tool he would use to wipe out humanity and bring all of existence under the insects’ control. That doesn’t quite work out after hapless security guard Stanley (Brian Downey) accidentally kickstarts the spaceship during an escape and becomes Lexx’s captain. Instead of bringing doom and destruction to the universe, Lexx is tasked to use his incredible powers to find planets of open-minded women. Lexx, the series, is very strange with deep lore stretching back thousands of years, but it’s also very horny. 

The biomechanical design of Lexx gives it a unique look on both the outside and the inside, similar to Farscape’s Moya, except it’s considerably more squishy on the inside. Passages are smaller, the crew’s quarters resemble organs, and even the ship controls look like fleshy, bulbous nodules. That’s the controls for everything from the shower to the steering, and the toilets. Instead of a bidet or toilet paper, Lexx’s toilets come complete with a tongue. Yes, it’s a strange show. 

Lexx Is The Strangest Sci-Fi Show In History

Lexx isn’t a great series, but it at least dared to do something different within the sci-fi genre by acknowledging sex exists. That part is obvious within a few minutes of watching an episode. Lexx, the ship, though, you’d think would be super-advanced, maybe thanks to an “organic computer” or accumulated hivemind memories from other insectoid ships, but no, Lexx makes Stanley look smart. The courier/security guard turned captain often has to explain simple concepts to the ship, but once he finally understands, he’s willing to do basically anything Stanley wants. 

The exception is when it comes time for food. Throughout the run of Lexx, Stanley keeps asking for fancy, exotic foods, and each time, the ship provides goop. There’s no fancy technology creating limitless amounts of food here. Only what the carnivorous ship is capable of producing for the rest of the crew, including Zev (Eba Habermann)/Xev (Xenia Seenburg), the rescued love-slave and later her clone, and Kai (Michael McManus), the thousands-year-old undead assassin. Fast, powerful, capable of feeding and taking care of the crew on the inside, Lexx is, thankfully, a one-of-a-kind ship. 

During the four seasons that Lexx was on the air, the quarters and bridge took on different appearances, explained by Lexx himself that he was growing, but in reality, the result of different budget levels for each season, letting the production crew go absolutely wild or, for Season 4, forced to restrain themselves. Throughout it all, Lexx is destroying planets both for noble reasons and Stanley’s selfish impulses, eating other ships and people, and remaining the weirdest ship in sci-fi that could only ever be a part of the strangest sci-fi series.