I always come late to the party.
Seriously. I came into Breaking Bad in its third season, Battlestar Galactica during that series’ third season, and Arrested Development in its second. Which means I wasn’t around to witness the birth of a television show which would shape so much of my early twenties. October 4, 1990 was the night in question. FOX was the station. Beverly Hills 90210 was the television show.
I was at the beginning of my senior year in high school. I had other things to keep me occupied at the time: figuring out whether or not I was going to college, assistant directing the Theatre Guild’s play, and working concessions at the University of Michigan. I had no time to worry about the lives of high school kids in Beverly Hills.
Two years later, on the other hand, there was plenty of time. I was 19 years old, living in a house with two other guys, and smoking and drinking a lot more than most people should. It was 1992, folks, and if you don’t remember those weird, heady, Rock The Vote/Nirvana/Bill Clinton’s saxophone days, you were probably there. Because you were doing what I was doing!
Anyway, during the summer of 1992, life for me was a bunch of drinking strawberry daiquiris, going to a cashier job at a grocery store, and deciding whether or not I was going to community college. Then my landlord and friend Dave and my other housemate, Jon, started watching 90210 Tuesdays. These were repeats of 90210‘s second season. I started joining them. Like any good soap opera, first you mock, and then you become obsessed. It became legendary among those in the house, and those who circled the house’s orbit, that you do not mess with the three of us on 90210 nights. We’d watch the repeats and once the third season started (with Brenda and Donna in Paris and Kelly getting it on with Dylan), it was sacrosanct.
Let’s back up a little and talk about the show itself and the world it came into. I was there when FOX premiered on April 5, 1987, kicking and screaming. The network showed its initial block of programming multiple times an evening. The Simpsons was an interstitial on The Tracey Ullman Show and has been a staple of FOX ever since. It was the first network that I really felt a part of. I would watch all the new programming on FOX because, like me, they were annoying juvenile rebels. FOX would premiere the actual series of The Simpsons in December 1989, almost two and a half years later.
But from 1987 to 1993, FOX was considered one step away from ludicrous by every other media outlet. Entertainment Weekly didn’t even cover it, because ratings were so low. It was the punchline of jokes on other television shows (when it wasn’t being skewered by its own Married…With Children). FOX was cultivating a youth demographic the other networks had ignored for too long.
Aaron Spelling, considered one of the giant producers of television, was passé at the time, his glory days of The Love Boat, Fantasy Island and Charlie’s Angels behind him. It would be a coup for FOX to land a producer of such weight on their fledgling network. FOX wanted a teen drama and enlisted Darren Star to develop a series. Star wanted to set it in Maryland, mirroring his hometown. But since FOX needed a solid, winning producer behind the untried Star, Spelling was hired and was instrumental in changing the setting to “exotic” Beverly Hills. The show, for a while, was known as “Class Of Beverly Hills” (which would later be the pilot’s title).
https://youtu.be/w0tce3nKRLg
The conceit of the show was that a family from Minnesota moved to Beverly Hills and encountered a society divorced from their middle America values. Brandon (Jason Priestly) and Brenda Walsh (Shannen Doherty) were twins and sophomores at West Beverly High. Brenda became fast friends with Kelly Taylor (Jennie Garth, a teen icon) and Donna Martin (Tori Spelling, who was vilified for the nepotistic casting, but really turned out to be the show’s secret weapon).
Brandon met the conceited Steve Sanders (Ian Ziering) and the token Jew Andrea Zuckerman (a 29-year-old Gabrielle Carteris!). Off in a side plot were the two geeks, David Silver (Brian Austin Green) and Scott Scanlon (Douglas Emerson). They’d dream about fitting in with the cool kids (David would, eventually, once his father married Donna’s mother; Scott would blow his head off playing with a gun). The most famous cast member wasn’t even in the first episode, and like Henry Winkler before him in Happy Days, eventually took over the show.
Dylan McKay (Luke Perry) was the son of financier Jack McKay, who was a bitter cynic, a James Dean-ish rebel, a bad boy that Brenda immediately fell for. FOX executives hated the character. They did their best to shove him out of the show. Spelling held fast; he and Perry got along well, and the drama needed Perry’s energy to spin stories. Ultimately, the Dylan/Kelly relationship would be a driving force of the show’s middle age, and both the death of Jack McKay (blowed up real good in his car… or was he?) and his spiral downwards kept it on life support for a while.
Doherty would leave the show in the fourth season, amidst reports of cast turmoil and disagreements. Tiffani-Amber Thiessen, late of Saved By The Bell, came in as new antagonist Valerie Malone, who swept Dylan into new heights of lows. By this time, Brandon had an affair with a married professor’s wife, Kelly started dating a bland lawyer (whom she would suddenly sprout a cocaine addiction with) and Donna had been involved with an abusive musician named Ray Pruit (Jamie Walters, from the failed Spelling show, The Heights). Dylan and Nat become partners in the Peach Pit after a fire destroys the building, transforming it into the Peach Pit After Dark, run by David, and featuring whatever new band FOX deemed hip that week. One time even the Rolling Stones were on the show!
https://youtu.be/zFd3DlSxBjs
The show barely resembled the teen drama it had been. Perry wanted off the show, so he was dispatched in the sixth season, quickly marrying a mobster’s daughter (Rebecca Gayheart) and watching her die. Andrea had left after getting pregnant and marrying her fellow law school student. Priestley tired of the grind and left the show, replaced by Perry, who returned as a “special guest star.” Kelly and Donna started a clothing store.
When the show finally ended in 2000, all of us — cast and audience — had been worn down enough that we were happy to see it rest in peace.
At my house, 90210 nights continued through the first few years I lived there. Imagine three drunken dudes in their twenties shouting “Donna Martin Graduates!” or gasping in shock after the California University election results came in and Josh Richland drove away from the Peach Pit in his rusty Honda Civic. I was there. We had our own rituals. Any time Joe E. Tata came on screen, we’d yell “NAT!” at the top of our lungs, like they’d yell “Norm!” on Cheers. We’d sneer at Brenda. We’d say nasty things about Kelly.
But by 1997, we’d moved to a second house, alcohol had been replaced by a medicinal equivalent, and the three of us had basically gone our separate ways. Whenever all of us were around, which was rare, we’d still gather around the warm hearth of the television and revisit our communal experience. More and more though, I’d watch videotapes of the show when I had a few moments and Dave and I would talk about it at the table when we met up.
Before the show ended, our seven-and-a-half-year living experience did. My girlfriend and I ended our year-long relationship and I was ready for a change. So like Brandon and Brenda, I moved out to the hills of Beverly. Well, 10 miles north to the beautiful San Fernando Valley. Of course the show influenced me to go there! If 90210 was anything, it was a commercial for Los Angeles. I’ve lived here 16 years now.
(An irony not lost on me is that while I was dreaming of moving to Beverly Hills, 90210, I actually moved to Van Nuys, 91411, which is where the soundstages for the show were. Jennie Garth remembered in her memoir, “We were isolated out in Van Nuys, on a skanky soundstage, working our asses off.”)
In its third season, the show begat Melrose Place (I still have the premiere episode on a VHS tape somewhere) and Models Inc. (sort of a spinoff from Melrose Place, the entire series of which I have on VHS). Nearly 10 years after both shows ended, the CW developed sequel series of 90210 (which lasted five seasons) and Melrose Place (canceled after one). The only one of those I watched regularly was Models Inc. I quit the original Melrose after the first season, and the same with the sequel 90210. It just wasn’t the same. Even when original cast members showed up, it wasn’t my 90210.
No, I’m not ashamed of my addiction. What I’m ashamed of is chasing the constant high of those soap operatics. I would binge-watch The O.C., Gilmore Girls, Veronica Mars, Pretty Little Liars, Greek, The Secret Life of the American Teenager and so on, trying to get back to my 90210 roots. In fact, I just purchased the first season of Hart of Dixie in the hopes of getting the same fix.
John P. Inloes (@suburbandwarf) is probably watching Hart of Dixie while you’ve been reading this. He can’t get enough Rachel Bilson. Did you see her in the Zach Braff movie The Last Kiss? She’s really good in that. Remember when she wore the Wonder Woman outfit for Seth Cohen in The O.C.? She was hot in that. Oh, yeah, what was I saying? He’s also trying to decide whether or not the side effects of the Halloween Whopper are worth the risk.
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