Is it really worse than Beauty and the Beast?

It's not any better than CSI Miami. People just did understand nocturnal costal thermal dinamics in 1996. Or to put it simply people just didn't know how hot the beach gets at night!

I unironically liked Beauty and the Beast in like 5th grade.

Hey man, I liked Highlander the Series.

"Made it to 44 episodes" is kind of misleading. It was a wildly different show in its first season (boilerplate private eye) and only got a second second by promising to make incredibly radical changes (as seen here).

The era of first-run syndicated series from the 1980s to the 1990s fascinates me, because for every otherwise bog-standard inane sitcom or cheesy action series there was some head-scratcher like the premise switch of Baywatch Nights. Especially during the 1990s, when companies were producing brand new television shows that were so bad that not even the WB or UPN networks would take them, including series trying to ride the wake of Baywatch, and then later the wake of Hercules/Xena. I myself watched a little too many of these various shows due to a combination of being a light sleeper and feeling the need to click around the TV channels at 2am until I stumbled across an episode of some dreck being broadcast on a local channel.

Part of the reason there was such a rise in action TV series appearing in first run syndication during the 1990s was that as production costs became higher, the networks were shy about shelling out money for high-concept action adventure series.

Baywatch, after being cancelled on NBC, made a comeback in first run syndication. It probably counted as an action series what with all of the rescues and occasional bad guys and such. Nothing tempts producers of TV series more than, after success, making a spinoff and Baywatch was a huge success. 44 episodes? Baywatch itself ended up with like, 242 episodes which was a long runner in that market. Eventually though the syndication market began to shrink and that's why you don't see these sort of series anymore except for the occasional anomaly.

I think it's important to note that season 1 was basically a Silk Stalkings knock off, with meh ratings. And during that season, the X-Files took off, so they decided "Hey, for season 2, let's just make it like X-Files!"