Rescue: HI-Surf’s Late-Season Glow-Up Wasn’t Enough to Save It
We’ve grown used to the loss of shows we’ve come to love in today’s television world.
The sentiment is especially prevalent when a network or streaming service doesn’t deem it viable for continuation after a first season.
I had a feeling we wouldn’t see another season of Rescue: HI-Surf, but even believing that, the news of its cancellation hit hard because the show had finally started to hit its stride during the latter part of its first season.
The action-drama series was highly anticipated when it premiered to high ratings after a football doubleheader on FOX.
But even with a strong early marketing campaign and a serviceable pilot, the series could never find that sweet spot with the audience, where a renewal felt like a foregone conclusion and not more of a toss-up.
They had all the ingredients for a successful show with quality actors and a beautiful backdrop, but the series could never figure out what show it wanted to be from the beginning.
The tone was all over the place. The promo made you think it would be a lot more soapy than it ended up being in the beginning, and while the rescues were always thrilling, some episodes struggled to find the balance between the personal drama and the action.
And that left us with hours that felt clunky, unbalanced, and didn’t even do much to enhance anyone’s story.
As I said earlier, the actors were terrific, but there were no breakout stars or recognizable faces with a true built-in audience that would travel with them from show to show.
Think Jensen Ackles — he has a slew of projects to his name currently, and has developed a passionate and devoted fanbase that will follow him to any show and see what spin he’ll add to his latest character.
Rescue: HI-Surf didn’t have anyone like that.
The characters were okay, but one thing the series did that drove me crazy was refusing to give us basic background information about some of the dynamics and the characters themselves.
You can’t enter into a brand-new show and act like the audience has known these characters for years.
A prime example of this was Will and Em, positioned to be the big pairing of the season, whose previous relationship was never shaded in enough for us to understand why we should even be rooting for them.
It wasn’t until the end of Rescue: HI-Surf Season 1 that we started to learn more about their pasts, but by then, many audience members had checked out.
Laka was another character they could never get right. Although he seemed to have an obvious storyline set out for him, it was all over the place, and by the time it became a tangible, interesting arc, the season was over.
The one thing the show did get right was Kainalu, who was by far the most interesting lifeguard, considering the origins of his arrival at the North Shore tower and the position his political father put him in.
If the series had scored a second season, it would have been better if they had focused more on the young lifeguard, brought in more of Shawn Hatosy‘s Daddy Emerson, and prioritized the will-they/won’t-they relationship between Kainalu and Hina over the melodrama that followed Will and Em.
The biggest shame is that they finally found the balance between drama, action, and character stories, resulting in a series that was hitting on all cylinders toward the end.
They were delivering some of their best hours toward the end, like the stellar Rescue: HI-Surf Season 1 Episode 13, which put Kainalu in the forefront alongside a high-stakes rescue.
It was one of the first times you could really see what the show was capable of.
The action pieces were never the issue, but this hour was about seeing a character through fresh eyes and how they were evolving from the person we met initially.
We saw Kainalu’s growth in that hour, which had been subtle up until then. While the hour was a blanket of sadness, it felt like such a feel-good moment for audiences.
The hour made you feel things, which all good shows do, and that wasn’t always the case in the earlier episodes.
Things were shaky to start, but they righted the ship and found the balance that made it an extremely enjoyable show.
It’s a shame it took so long because if they’d been a bit more cohesive from the start, we may be talking about all the stories we’d love to see moving forward, as opposed to lamenting the cancellation of a series that stuck the landing but suffered because of everything that came before it.
I’m a little sad about this one, but not wholly surprised, unfortunately.
What about you all?
Are you sad to see Rescue: HI-Surf go?
What will you miss about it?
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Watch Rescue HI: Surf Online
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