I've always suspected the financiers and EPs were making boatloads of money selling this show since it was a independently produced / syndicated show and they could and did sell to anyone who was paying. This wasn't super common at the time for a scripted show to not have a dedicated distributor, so since they didn't have a distributor covering 80% of production costs, the production company simply wasnt willing to front that much money

Short story, I was in a professional lecture with some people who's job it was to sell these kinds of TV shows to international outlets, and he talked how the shows were always cheap as hell to make because they could just make ridiculous money selling them in Europe if it lasted a long time.. but they could also get absolutely screwed if they had to put up production costs and then weren't able to sell it at a good rate because there were so many other shows out there for the international market.

I believe Baywatch was really big in Germany, and that was their go to for non-English markets (but might be wrong here)