The fight for the future of Los Angeles, America’s second-largest city, usually plays out in the grand art deco offices and committee rooms of city hall. But in an election year full of surprises, the most consequential battle may in fact have begun on a beach.

And not just any beach: we’re talking about the fantasy sandbox inhabited by buff gym rats and sun-kissed bikini babes on Baywatch and its multiple spin-offs. In February, Los Angeles welcomed the latest incarnation of the hit TV show back to southern California after a long hiatus, including detours to Hawaii and Georgia. City officials heralded its return as a sign of better times for local film and television production following years of decline and tens of thousands of job losses in the heart of Hollywood.

But trouble soon beckoned. The producers, who had built a new lifeguard station on Venice Beach in preparation for what they anticipated to be a multi-season reboot, learned they were not allowed to use the camera drones they were counting on, or to shoot at night.

They had a $21m tax credit from the state and what they thought was the full blessing of the local authorities. But a handful of regulatory agencies, notably the county beaches and harbors department, had other ideas, and within four days shooting ground to a halt under a barrage of unexpected restrictions involving everything from the sand they could shoot on to the parking arrangements.

“Suddenly, everything was ‘no’,” one member of the production wrote in a widely read anonymous Instagram post that quickly morphed into a political flashpoint. “Los Angeles is not film friendly.”

Such a verdict appeared potentially devastating to a city that has struggled mightily for years to stop productions fleeing to cheaper locations – Atlanta, Toronto, London, Budapest – and has seen businesses around the industry from catering to costume rental flounder and fail. In an election year, the prospect of losing Baywatch so soon after luring it back brought the knives out for LA’s mayor, Karen Bass, who leads in the polls but has had a bumpy time defending her record in a city ravaged by housing shortages, soaring living costs, tent cities on the streets and last year’s devastating wildfires.

Spencer Pratt, the former reality TV star challenging Bass from the right, blamed the Baywatch mess on what he called “political fecklessness” and “a perfect storm of self-inflicted wounds”. “This is not an isolated production snafu. It is the new normal in a city once synonymous with the dream factory,” he thundered in a Substack post.

Nithya Raman, a city council member challenging Bass from the left, also mucked in with a campaign video highlighting the near-50% loss in shooting days in Los Angeles since 2018. She has also denounced “ridiculous conditions” that, she said, made it difficult to attract productions. “For too long, Los Angeles has treated Hollywood as an inconvenience rather than an asset,” she wrote in X.

Bass, for her part, jumped on the Baywatch calamity like a five-alarm fire and worked with other members of the city council, the state coastal commission and FilmLA, a non-profit permitting office that acts as a liaison between film producers and the many jurisdictions and agencies across Los Angeles county, to fix it as fast as possible.

By mid-April she was able to announce that Baywatch was staying in Venice after all and promised that the city of Los Angeles would “always clear bureaucratic barriers, making it easier and more affordable to film in the entertainment capital of the world”.

She and her city council colleagues did not stop there, taking measures to coordinate permit regulations better between agencies, speeding up certification of new soundstages so they can be available faster and waiving all fees for what are known as “microshoots”, small independent productions involving just a few people. FilmLA, meanwhile, announced a six-month pilot program to cover the cost of permits for what it calls “low-impact” productions that are small enough not to cause disruption to traffic or street access.

By the end of April, Bass was further buoyed up by new data showing the first significant uptick in shooting days in the Los Angeles area since the Covid pandemic – a 10.7% increase in all productions from the last quarter of 2025 to the first quarter of 2026, with a particularly pronounced boom in feature films, which saw a 45% increase in shooting days over the same period.

“We have a long way to go, but after years of decline, Hollywood is finally turning a corner with more productions and more jobs,” Bass proclaimed. “We have worked hand in hand with industry partners to make filming in Los Angeles easier and more affordable.”

The criticisms, though, have not let up, as Bass’s rivals accuse her of moving too slowly and only in response to a crisis. “The people saying ‘we’re going to act’ have been insiders for four to six years in city government. Why are they only doing things now?” said Adam Miller, an education technology entrepreneur and urban policy advocate making his own long-shot run for mayor.

At the same time, the problems besetting the entertainment industry are bigger than one TV show, industry experts and political analysts say, and bigger than anything even the most efficient city government can control, let alone turn around.

Dramatic advances in technology have made producers less reliant on location shooting and require smaller crews and fewer days now than they did 10 or 20 years ago – and have opened the door to artificial intelligence starting to replace actors and writers.

The number of credible production centers around the world has grown, and so have the incentive structures that city and national governments offer to bring in more business. Since California has a particularly high cost of living, affecting everything from meals to the price of filling up production vehicles with gas, the temptation to take production elsewhere has been substantial and keeps increasing.

It was exactly this concern that prompted California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, to wrest $750m in entertainment-industry tax breaks and other incentives out of the state legislature last year – and data from FilmLA shows it has been these incentives, more than expedited city permitting or reduced fees, that have spurred much of the new production.

“That’s what’s driving it right now,” FilmLA’s chief executive, Denise Gutches, said in an interview. “It’s great news, and we anticipate, with the 147 projects that were given the [state] incentive, that we’ll see more increases.”

And so critics of the current mayor have accused Bass of taking credit for a turnaround she did not initiate. With at least one eye on the 2 June mayoral primary, her rivals have also warned that LA needs an entirely new approach and a much greater sense of urgency.

“If we have another four years of this,” Miller charged, “we’ll never be able to get Hollywood back because the talent won’t be here any more.”

Bass’s office did in fact highlight the issue before the Baywatch crisis: her administration unrolled a package of measures a year ago that it called Reel Change to lift some restrictions on filming at city-owned locations and cut fees. And, her administration says, she was directly involved in negotiations to bring Baywatch to LA and in the state tax incentive package that made it possible.

The angst about southern California’s signature industry has continued to rise, however, and has triggered a similar debate among the state’s gubernatorial candidates.

Working in LA’s favor is the fact that many productions want to be here, since it’s where the business end of Hollywood is still based and where a lot of producers, directors, actors and writers live. Gutches, the FilmLA chief, said she’d heard this over and over in listening sessions she’s had with smaller independent producers over the past year.

But, she said, her organization is often vexed by the spaghetti bowl of rules and ordinances across the LA region, which has a county government and 88 separate city governments, all with their own semi-independent agencies responsible for fire prevention, traffic, public safety, utilities and other services that interact with film crews.

She spends much of her time trying to get everyone to follow the same framework so permits can be issued three days after a production applies for them. But, she said, it is not a fail-safe process.

Of the Baywatch impasse, she said: “It was a lesson in how we need to identify where film has to have some level of priority over ordinances that, for example, do not allow drones over the beach. The rule is understandable, but if a production is going to bring millions of dollars into the economy, we can also agree to make an exception.”

Miller, like Pratt, made a connection between LA’s struggles to attract Hollywood business and its struggles to attract business more generally. “It’s not just entertainment – it’s all the things that work with that industry: catering, stylists, makeup, transportation, manufacturers,” he said. “It’s the backbone of LA and we’re not treating it with the urgency that we need to.”

When it comes to solutions, Bass and her rivals tend to hit many of the same notes and sound strikingly similar in the remedies they propose: less bureaucracy, faster turnaround times and lower fees for lower-budget productions that can be crippled by the cost of fire checks, road closure fees, city staffing fees and other demands that studio productions absorb more easily.

Pratt, for example, has said he would put public money into FilmLA, cut location fees, eliminate the need for city officials on set for most productions, and introduce instant pre-approvals for standard street closures and safety plans. But that is not wildly different from what Bass and FilmLA are either doing already or pushing to do soon.

Raman says she would create an office dedicated exclusively to bringing in location shoots and smoothing out the bureaucracy around them. Bass gave exactly that responsibility last year to her public works chief, Steve Kang, but Raman and Miller say it needs to be someone with no other brief – a “deputy mayor of Hollywood”, in Miller’s words, “not somebody doing it on the side”.

In response, Bass spokesman Alex Stack accused Raman of her own lack of energy in helping Hollywood, saying she had authored no industry-friendly legislation in her six years on the city council. “None of the other candidates in this race have any results they can point to except campaign talking points,” he added.

Gutches said her job precluded her from saying whom she would vote for. But she observed: “All the measures proposed by the candidates have merit. How they get executed is a different story.”