Cynical Cinema

I can remember, to some degree, Beverly Hills 90210 from my childhood. I don’t think I ever watched the show, but I knew all about it because it was one of those pervasive pop culture phenomena the became a part of my young life regardless of any involvement I may personally have had in watching the show. I remember Kelly, and Brandon, and Dylan and Andrea and Brenda and Steve. I remember that Tori Spelling and Shannen Doherty and Luke Perry were the stars. And I remember that it was some kind of high-school related soap opera starring thirty-something actors passing for teenagers. And I attempted to revisit this phenomenon again when Paramount Home Entertainment released Season Five of Beverly Hills 90210 today, July 29th.

By season five, the stars of the show have already moved on to college, and now they look like they may well be college kids. Well, except for that girl who plays Andrea, who has a baby and a husband and looks like she could be forty. And Luke Perry, who is a drunken bad-boy this season and looks as though he could be forty-six. It’s almost hilarious to see him show up at a bar and be refused service because he’s underage. He’s clearly in his forties! Season Five is (I can only assume) better than Season Four, if only because Shannen Doherty has left the show (as explained in the first episode - Brenda has received some kind of scholarship to some school and will be staying in some European town and is not coming back). Taking her place is Valerie, played by Tiffany Amber Thiessen, (Kelly from Saved By The Bell), who is much hotter. So far so good.

Donna (Tori Spelling) is a rich little girl with rich old parents who buy her everything she wants. She is scheduled to make her “debut” later this season, because apparently this “debutante” crap still exists somewhere in the states. Her parents are nervous when she exhibits some behaviour unbecoming a young lady, like talking to a black man. But her friends are there for her. Her yes-man friends, who pat her on the head and tell her she’s special and that everyone loves her and she’ll be just fine. So, for all intents and purposes, she’s playing the real-life Tori Spelling. The only thing missing on this show is that her name is not “Tori”. I guess daddy bought her an acting career as well as all that plastic surgery.

Isn’t it amazing, thinking back on that cast now, that currently the most famous of all the cast members IS Tori Spelling? The only one who appears in tabloids and in the news and in the entertainment shows. Whatever happened to Ian Ziering? Or Jason Priestly? Or, more interestingly, Jennie Garth? Jennie Garth (who plays Kelly) was actually good. As an actress. Head and shoulders above the rest of the cast. Well, she’s often acting beside Tori Spelling, which doesn’t hurt. But not only was she the best actress on the show, she was also the hottest girl. So shouldn’t that have meant a bigger career for her after this show had run it’s course?

But the biggest mystery of all, for me, was the disappearance of Luke Perry following the end of Beverly Hills 90210. This guy, in season five, is a drunken, rebellious bad-boy. Compared to the rest of this (as Valerie says in episode 2) obnoxiously squeaky-clean bunch of L.A. dinks, he’s Satan. And the girls love his bad-assery. He’s the sex symbol. And the show never stops doing all it can to remind us of that. They play up his resemblance to James Dean every chance they get, filming him the same way Dean was filmed, posing him the same way Dean posed. And when they aren’t creating a James Dean for the 90s, they are shooting him like Brando! With that kind of exposure, how could he not have become the biggest star in movies? The bad-boy cool kid, the tough guy heart-throb? Perhaps it’s because he started doing all this cool-young-kid stuff when he was forty-one.

This show is amazingly dated. Not just because of the hair - and they all have hilarious 90s hair - but because it’s so much less risque than any similar show today. It’s like watching Biff and Judy splitting a malt down at the hamburger stand, only now it’s Brendan and Kelly at the Peach Pit. The scenes where they try to show how BAD Valerie is by having a close-up of her rolling a joint are almost precious when we see them today. The more dramatic a moment is supposed to be, the funnier it actually is. This show may well have been the biggest thing in the world in 1995, but it got real irrelevant, real fast by the year 2000.