“Back in the day if u did a tv show called surf dracula you’d see that fool surfing every week in new adventures,” a famous viral tweet posits. “But in the streaming era the entire 1st season gotta be a long ass flashback to how he got the surfboard until you finally get to see him surf for 5 min in the finale.”
“Surf Dracula” comes to mind while watching “Rescue HI-Surf,” not just because of the subject matter, but because there’s a surf rescue in the first five minutes of Fox’s Hawaii-set action series. “Rescue HI-Surf” is an old school broadcast drama that values efficiency and immediacy in its storytelling.