Hulu's new 'Baywatch' documentary misses something important about the show's true appeal

How did Baywatch, the 1990s television series that made Pamela Anderson and Carmen Electra household names, bring a specific vision of the California dream into the world's imagination, make the red one-piece a cultural (and sexual) icon and make the slow-motion run a must-watch for every hot guy on the beach? What did this wildly popular show mean to America, and perhaps the world? A new Hulu docuseries, After Baywatch, seeks to answer just that.

Spoiler: That's not true. But it paints a telling picture of a shallow, hollow show with a shallow, hollow cast that embodied some of the worst aspects of '90s pop culture. It also shows how the show set the stage for the rapidly evolving cheap entertainment that eventually gave us reality TV and social media influencers.

The most compelling star of Baywatch is still the most compelling person decades later: Pamela Anderson. Anderson, however, did not agree to interviews for this documentary. After a life of tabloid exploitation, she returned to her Canadian hometown, where she traded in her trademark pencil-thin eyebrows, smoky-thick eyelashes and overly made-up lips for a bare face. She renovated her house. She runs a skincare brand. She is an animal rights activist. She enjoys spending time with her dogs.

Anderson is not featured in the documentary—the filmmakers use old interviews to piece together her story—but the documentary's treatment of her is flat and devoid of substance: She was a convincing Playboy model who made the magazine a go-to source for “Baywatch” talent; the paparazzi were aggressive; a leaked sex tape nearly ruined her career, but she pulled through, and later sex tapes actually catapulted some B-list celebs like Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian to fame. The only somewhat interesting revelation is that David Hasselhoff initially didn't want Anderson on the show because he feared everyone would be looking at her and not him.

In reality, there's a lot more to say about Anderson, and how she was a tangled web of contradictions that have so many parallels to the lives of young women in the '90s: She was super sexy and sexualized, and with that came the assumption that she had no right to privacy even in her most intimate sexual matters; she partied, had bad taste in men, and liked to be a little trashy, which seemed to give the public permission to ignore or even criticize the fact that she was married to a violent domestic abuser—a fact that Anderson herself doesn't seem to have fully processed or addressed, downplaying the abuse at the hands of her husband Tommy Lee even decades later. Even now, she seems to want to put her past behind her without fully confronting it.

This is not unlike the general public's relationship with the decade that made Anderson famous and the show that shaped it. Paris Hilton, arguably the Pam Anderson of the next decade—blonde, beautiful, widely mocked, widely admired, victim of her own leaked sex tape (with a man who later married and divorced Anderson) told a reporter in the early 2000s, “My friends always tell me I'm not sexual. Sexy but not sexual.” This ideal, that women were sexually performative for men but not really sexual for themselves, was at the core of “Baywatch” and the expectations of turn-of-the-century female celebrities. As the show progressed, the legs of the red Baywatch suits were cut higher and the necklines lower, but the scripts remained cheesy and even respectable. Sometimes there just wasn't enough footage to fill the entire runtime of the show, so it was padded out with montages of California sunsets, perky butts on beaches, and of course, the infamous slow-motion runs of bouncing boobs in the sand.

Unfortunately, the “Baywatch” docuseries doesn’t particularly delve into the ways in which the show reflected and perpetuated the decade’s differing views on female sexuality. And, truth be told, the show’s cast — now Botoxed and fillered into the big-eyed, pouty-lip aesthetic familiar to anyone who’s watched an episode of Real Housewives — just seems incapable of, or at least uninterested in, engaging in even the moderate intellectual inquiry that would be required to provide any real insight into the show’s larger impact or meaning. “We’ve had the beautiful ones,” Hasselhoff notes of the “Baywatch” actresses. “And we’ve had the real ones. But they’re all real. Because they all went in the water.” (His general diagnosis of the show's quality? “The show – it wasn't good. But we made it good.”) Carmen Electra attempts to assess the show's feminist impact, musing, “I think Baywatch was ahead of its time. Because the men were in it. And the men looked hot.” One actor after another notes that being on the show “changed” their lives.

Unfortunately, the docuseries is unlikely to change anyone's life or even deepen anyone's understanding of Baywatch; by the end of the first part, you begin to wonder how the series was stretched to four parts in the first place (the answer: considerable repetition and, like the series itself, lots of buoyant montages). Maybe that's the unintended lesson. Not every cultural artifact has a deeper meaning. Sometimes people do stupid things, and the rest of us watch because we're animals who like boobs and washboard abs and the suggestion of sex. The '90s didn't invent that impulse, though it was the decade when it arguably ran at full speed. And now, 30 years later, we have an endless barrage of sexy-but-not-sexual babble from reality TV to TikTok. Not to mention a former president (and maybe a future one) who joined right in, starring in his own reality TV show and having an affair with a porn star that doesn't sound like she particularly enjoyed it.

But we also have new language to talk about that cultural brutalization, and new, better standards for the women whose lives and bodies have so often been treated as proxies for our collective sexual dysfunctions. Pamela Anderson isn't just living her best life on a Canadian island; she's also been culturally rehabilitated. The paparazzi-harassed and sexually exploited women who followed in her footsteps – Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, and so on – have also seen a more feminist public help them rewrite their stories. As television has become saturated with cheaply produced trash, viewers have also rebelled, making room for a TV renaissance. The post-Baywatch era has given TV audiences some of the best TV shows ever made.

It's a shame that this much more interesting material was ignored in favor of silly observations and Jeremy Jackson's claim that he sniffed his fellow actors' swimsuits. But that was, for better or worse, Baywatch: empty, appealing to little more than the viewer's most basic impulses, and as flimsy as a little red one-piece.

This article was originally published on MSNBC.com.