Due to of all talk about the new CW version of 90210 as well as my (perhaps belated?) discovery of hulu.com, I started watching the first season of the original Beverly Hills 90210 that premiered back in 1990 when I was in grade 11. I don't remember watching 90210 at first. I don't think it was even available in my area. Back then you could only get CBS in the happiest city in Canada if you had a cable box, and they were pretty rare. Instead most of my exposure to the show came from reading Sassy. I think by the second season it was picked up by a Canadian affiliate and I got hooked. But this was my first time watching that important first season, which I did with a mixture of enjoyment (I do love me some teen drama), nostalgia, and, inevitably, some cultural criticism. It's hard not to think about how teenage life or representations of teenagers have changed in the last 18 years.
The story lines are delightfully soapy and silly, what the fug girls have described so aptly as "Spelling's cheesy, preachy pastiche of love triangles and after-school special issues." Will Brandon cheat on his history midterm? Will Brenda shoplift? Does taking off a pair of glasses immediately turn a girl from plain to beautiful? (We already know the answers, but it's still fun to see it unfold.)
My respect for Jason Priestley increased immensely. Brandon Walsh is very much the moral center of the show -- not an enviable task And yet he does it without being a complete drag. Watching the show now, I do find it hard to disentangle Shannen Dougherty's "difficult" reputation from her character Brenda, although there's no real connection. Nevertheless, I keep waiting for signs of Shannen's notorious bitchiness to appear. And the casting of Gabrielle Carteris to play a teenager remains perplexing after all these years. I always found the Andrea character so annoying and could never understand why they would choose a 30 year old woman to play her. I still don't get it.
The fashion is impossible to ignore. I laughed out loud when Dylan, the James Dean wannabe, appeared wearing overalls with one strap undone. The jeans, high-waisted and belted, look so ugly and dated. But I was struck by how the girls' clothes are not all that revealing. No cleavage and not tight at all. Instead big blousey shirts, baby doll dresses. Unless they're in swimwear, there's just not a lot of skin on display. The girls' bodies have changed, too -- or what qualifies as "the perfect body" has changed. No one on that show is fat -- not by any stretch. But they aren't skinny skinny either, like we've gotten used to. They have flesh. In one scene, I was surprised by how much thigh a girl in a bikini had. But it's normal. I've just adjusted to anorexic.
And the mother. Poor Carol Walsh, she's a 1950s housewife and such mothers don't exist on tv anymore. Or at least not on teen dramas. Even if a mother on TV is a SAHM, she still has to be hot. And while I realize part of the story revolves around the clash between Midwestern values and Beverly Hills glitz,there's no way a mother on tv today would wear elastic band pants.
I'm sure there are lots of people who have written about the show and why it has endured so well in the popular imagination. This is not my attempt to do so. These are just observations. I might write more about it. I'm only on episode 7, and while there's been some Dylan/Brenda flirting going on, their relationship hasn't blossomed yet. I'm interested to see how Brenda's controversial loss of virginity will play now that teenage sex is pretty standard.
