Unzipped code
As if it wasn’t enough that Aaron Spelling’s skill-free daughter Tori is in another one of those loaf-end reality copouts with career-less husband Dean McDermott (Tori and Dean, Home Sweet Hollywood), the new 90210 set to drop in September of this year could be why he’s turning — no, ramming his head against coffin wood — in his tomb right about now. If patriarch Spelling, high priest producer of other hormone-driven ‘90s soaps like
While producers have decided to keep that guitar-grinding intro that, with its aural bottling of tanning oil and teen spirit, signals your driving into “America’s favorite zip code,” you only need to sit through the spin-off’s trailer to feel like you’d missed a turn on your way to finding that good ol’ suburban ‘hood where character profiles were as overt as the palm trees that decked it. Like that place where Brandon, Brenda, Donna, Kelly and Dylan used to skip merrily through, doing ring-around-the-rosies on the moral fulcrum that the show shot to after-school activity fame with, is now presided over by M. Night Shyamalan and each new character seems a little more sinister and a lot more complex.
‘90s-210
In this day and age especially, sex is not a game no matter how it looks on movies and TV,” Jim Walsh, the voice of flexibly conservative reason, had counseled daughter Brenda (played by Shannen Doherty) after a pregnancy scare following her popping of cherry by brood-o-rammic boyfriend Dylan (Luke Perry) in the second season — the only box set my “dibidi” dealer Al’Hamimi had available due to its popularity. Still, perusing the first five episodes of the summer after freshman year was enough to indicate a time forgotten — after most acne-ridden teens had cerebrally assimilated those electric-blue high school yearbook cast shots that, by 1991, had gotten male viewers to ponder “90210 sideburns” (thanks to the Jimmy Dean rip-off that is Jason Priestley) and girls to snag themselves “Brenda bangs” (c/o Doherty). Within five episodes, Brenda had proceeded to break-up with Dylan after he’d asked her to get on “the pill,” blonde town sexpot Kelly Taylor (a role Jennie Garth could never outlive) had become buds with a suitor-turned-first-gay friend, and Dylan (and Kelly, and Brian Austin Green’s David Silver) was learning to deal with parental issues — divorce, incarceration, abandonment — all presented in the sort of vintage teen precaution segments you see on The Knowledge Channel, with a slow tune cued for viewer contemplation and lines lifted from public service announcements (“You know, when a woman is sexually active, she’s got to deal with a lot of responsibilities,” advises Brenda’s gynecologist during her preggo panic attack).
Even after Brandon et al hopped from West Beverly High to California College and the show’s writers began to shed enough klieg light on AIDS, gay and lesbian rights, and cokewhoring, all that stuff is as edgy today as a 10-inch dildo in a porn convention, especially with the now-huh?-ness of Donna Martin’s (Tori Spelling’s grade-A succumbing to nepotism) vow of chastity throughout eight seasons. But back then — at the dawn of post-‘80s disillusionment and the influx of STD campaigns — you could hear your sister in the next room gasping “Nooo waayyy!!!” as each episode presented a noteworthy issue that affected the twin Walshes and the rest of their gang, laying piece-by-piece definition to a generation with its hands held up in helplessness.
‘90-2000s (and possibly, beyond)
Since most of the ‘90s cast members have assumed middle age and are living on paychecks of yore (with the exception of the 16-episode star Hillary Swank, of course), TV times have undoubtedly changed even if that zip code stays the same. Where grunge-era 90210 was a trailblazer for all the pimply and pubescent-targeted programming that had cropped up since its final episode in 2000 — the SNL and MAD TV parodies in its wake as proof of its originality — the new 90210 might find it a bit difficult to plant the flag of audience influence the Spelling-backed show first did at the teen drama summit.
Then again, if the spin-off’s promos truly foreshadow what is to come, all the kids weaned on over-intellectualized Dawson’s Creek dialogue, emotionally conditioned by soundtrack-backed One Tree Hill and The OC plotlines, or reflexively desensitized by the too-close-to-home cringe induction of The Real World and the pseudo-realness of Laguna Beach and The Hills, might just get exactly what they need at this point: a show they can still resonate with despite everything they’d been screen-fed. Which might explain why the trailer for the newly botoxed 90210 feels like a scintillatingly frigid Bret Easton-Ellis novel unfolding right before your eyes, reflecting the resignation of living the end times out in a moral wasteland like Beverly Hills; or more like a Skins episode, if there was more California sun and no working class Brit kids involved. There’s a snippet of seductive Jacuzzi-idling, some Beemer headlight-flashing, and a whole lot of by-the-beach frolicking with all that exposed bronze skin amplified by a coating of music video sheen. And then there are the characters with names like Silver, Navid and Naomi — the loaded class hippie, Persian newsroom geek, and jock trophy of a town bicycle/bitch, respectively — breathing nihilistic/hedonistic life into such scenarios and tempering the show’s vague sell of being “cooler, sexier, more provocative.”
In this day and age of Obaman political correctness, this zip’s even got a black character named Dixon filling Brandon’s shoes as adopted brother/brutha-rescued-from-the-projects to the impressionable-yet-“grounded” “Brenda” character of Annie Mills, who actually looks like a walking LiLo clone. And like their predecessors, even both hail from a small town with Walsh/Coen-esque parents as the liberal bearers of ethics: a “cool mom” who’s a pro-athlete-turned-personal trainer and a dad who moved back to his plush hometown to keep an eye on his alcoholic former ‘70s actress of a mother (aptly played by the Bluth matriarch in Arrested Development) after conveniently bagging the principal gig at West Beverly High.
To the fans who’d lived their teen years out with the original characters (never mind that a few of those cast members were in their late 20s), the zip’s new residents might seem a little too mature, self-indulgent, and, well, too much unlike the ol’ gang to viewers steeped in the naivete of Brenda and less privy to all the invaded privacy and manipulation that goes around in 90210’s CW Network kin Gossip Girl. It could also be why Jennie Garth, reprising her role as the hyper-sexual yet self-aware Kelly Taylor — the only character confirmed to star in the new series and a sort of Serena van der Woodsen-Kristin Cavallari hybrid that’s more now than she was then — fits in as the school’s guidance counselor, at a time when even Disney idols have trumped actors hailing from the house of Spelling in overt sexuality (not even Tiffani Thiessen had naked snaps floating around like Vanessa Hudgens, at 17).
Along with skinnies, Blackberries, and steroidal narcissism replacing high-waist acid wash jeans, Trapper Keepers, and millennial uncertainty, talking points also had to be replaced, if only for kids to have something to fervently discuss right before the bell rings. Only a few episodes will tell, but who knows — Annie, Dixon, and Silver could be the Brenda, Brandon and Donna of a new generation, representing a decade-spanning time capsule to the 2000s (and possibly, beyond), like how Spelling’s showbaby was to the kids of the ‘90s. “Aaron Spelling,” some 16-year-old, hyped on the shiz that went down on that 90210 episode last week, will ask, “Who the hell is he?”
