When Beverly Hills, 90210 first debuted on the then-fledgling Fox network in the fall of 1990, no one quite knew what to make of it. Aimed at teens but presented at the pitch of soapy adult dramas, its initial fish-out-of-water premise about the Midwestern Walsh family (shout out to my fellow Minnesotans in Wayzata — too bad Brenda always pronounced the name of your city incorrectly!) moving to the posh world of Beverly Hills (whose ZIP code would soon become the most famous in the world) initially seemed too over-the-top for its intended teen audience and too teen for adult viewers turning in at prime time.
But the show quickly found its voice by keeping its teen characters front and center, treating their stories with the deadly earnestness (often to ridiculous degrees, as we'll see) of an adult prime time drama. That approach, combined with a groundbreaking stunt in which Fox released the beginning of the show's second season as a special "summer season" — a time when all the other networks were airing reruns, giving 90210 an easy audience to hook — turned the show into one of Fox's biggest hits. It became a cultural phenomenon, invading the zeitgeist of the time and lasting 10 seasons. The series defined the 1990s and ended, appropriately enough, in 2000 (prompting a handful of spinoffs, sequels, and reboots). If there's a Mount Rushmore of shows that allowed the Fox network to establish itself as a legitimate fourth network, Beverly Hills 90210 is on it (the others are Married … with Children, The Simpsons, Cops, and In Living Color).
Through those 10 years, the adventures of Brenda (Shannon Doherty) and Brandon (Jason Priestly) Walsh and their friends, family, and assorted hangers-on ebbed and flowed with varying degrees of straightforward drama and soap opera–level ridiculousness — even and especially when both Brenda and Brandon were no longer part of the series. From coked-up fashion shows to pregnancy scares to exploding dads, 90210 was never afraid to walk the thin lines separating presentations of real-world concerns, Very Special Episode moralizing, and soapy attention-grabbing schlock.
90210 is, for me, a foundational show and remains one of my all-time favorites. So in celebration of its glorious tonal mélange, I present the 10 most ridiculous moments from 10 years of Beverly Hills 90210.
No Walshes, No Problem
The original, fish-out-of-water premise of 90210 focused on the Walsh family, and that family included Brenda and Brandon's parents, Jim (James Eckhouse) and Cindy (Carol Potter). Early in the show's run, it made a point of cycling stories to Jim and Cindy (he fantasized about sleeping with his hot receptionist! She almost ran away with a photographer!) as well as some of the other kids' parents. (No one can forget when Jackie, Kelly's mom, emceed a teen fashion show coked out of her gourd.) But by the show's fifth season, with the characters firmly ensconced in college, Jim and Cindy bled further and further into the background, and by season's end, they were written out of the show completely (Jim took a job in Japan).
Along the way, their home, the Walsh house, became one of the series' most iconic locations. (Fun facts: A different house was used for the pilot episode, and the location of the real house used for the exterior shots is actually in Altadena, not Beverly Hills.) The series' producers felt they couldn't abandon the location — plus, all those sets were already paid for — so through various hand-waving plot machinations (something something escrow), arrangements were made for Brandon and his buddy Steve (Ian Ziering) to continue living in the Walsh house even after the Walsh parents moved away. Okay, fine.
But at that point in time, Brenda had already left the show. (Shannon Doherty wanted out, so Brenda went to drama school in London.) A few years later, Brandon left as well. Did the complete absence of the show's initial POV characters, the ones around whom the entire premise was built, stop the show from continuing for another season-and-a-half? No. Nor did it mean the end of the Walsh house as a central location, as Brandon just let Steve continue to live in the house after he moved east for a job as a fledgling reporter. It was one thing when Jim and Cindy continued to pay the mortgage for at least one of their kids, but it sure seems like someone in the Walsh family could have used that equity once there were no longer any Walshes living in, you know, the Walsh house.
A Vice Principal Walks Into a Bachelorette Party ...
With both Brenda and Brandon long gone, the eventual finale of the series centered around the wedding of longtime on-again, off-again romantic couple David (Brian Austin Green) and Donna (Tori Spelling). In the course of that finale, a few old friends make return appearances. Tiffany Amber Thiessen's Valerie (aka "New Brenda," who arrived after Brenda left then left the show shortly after Brandon) and Andrea (Gabrielle Carteris, an OG cast member who left in Season 5) turn up at Donna's bachelorette party, while Brandon appeared via video message at David's bachelor party.
But of course, as everyone knows, you can't have a bachelorette party without your old high school vice principal. Except, wait, no, that's not a thing. But sure enough, good ol' Mrs. Teasley (Denise Dowse) — who once led the charge to suspend Donna from high school after she was caught drinking at the prom — makes a return appearance long after the West Beverly Hills High School class of 1993 graduated to play naughty games along with the rest of the now-adult ladies — at least a few of whom were once her students. It's an utterly bizarre appearance that screams "we wanted one more cameo for the finale, but this is the best we could do."
Who Are You?
Amnesia plotlines are a staple of soap opera storytelling, and 90210 is no exception. The series was already growing long in the tooth at the start of its eighth season (the first in which the characters no longer had any school to attend, having finished high school and college) and began to lean more heavily than ever into traditional soap opera tropes. But even by those standards, the plotline involving Kelly (Jennie Garth) getting shot during a carjacking as the gang returns from a vacation in Hawaii, in just such a way that she gets amnesia but only of her knowledge of/life with Brandon, is pretty ridiculous. It was neither the first nor the last plotline designed to keep the romance between Brandon and Kelly treading water, but it was one of the more nakedly soap operatic.
The Dead Walk
Bringing characters back from the dead is a staple of soap operas (and comic books); 90210 certainly couldn't escape the trope. When Dylan's (Luke Perry) dad Jack McKay (Josh Taylor) a crooked financier with ties to the mob, exploded in a car bomb shortly after getting out of jail and reconciling with his son in a late season three episode, it was an iconic entry in the show's "happiness doesn't make for good drama" files.
Years later, in the show's final season, Dylan more or less accidentally stumbles onto the fact that his dad is, in fact, alive and well, having faked his death in order to protect Dylan from the mob and enter witness protection, complete with a new family all his own. It was 90210 at its most nakedly soap operatic — yet also the last time the show genuinely surprised me.
Alcohol, Alcohol Everywhere But Not Allowed To Drink
Every show with teen characters needs a spot for said characters to hang out. The Happy Days gang had Arnold's Drive-In, the Saved by the Bell crew had the Max, and the students of West Bev had the Peach Pit, a retro greasy spoon diner run by a retired Hollywood Golden Age actor named Nat (speaking of Happy Days, one could make a good case that 90210 jumped the shark when it added Nat actor Joe E. Tata to the opening credits). Brandon worked there during high school, Brenda cosplayed as an awful '50s waitress named Laverne one time, and the ridiculously-wealthy Dylan bought into the Pit, becoming Nat's partner.
But as the characters got older and entered college, it became increasingly odd that they were all hanging out at an old diner. Enter the Peach Pit After Dark, a joint venture by Steve, Steve's Dad, Dylan, and Nat which turned an adjacent space into a nightclub (which in turn served as a vehicle for bringing in ratings-boosting and home video-rights-complicating musical guests like Christina Aguilera and Barenaked Ladies). The problem is that the teens-turned-20-somethings were the central characters, not the adults fading further and further out of their orbit. And so it went that a series of characters, notably David and Valerie, became managers of the club, worrying about making payroll and struggling to cover the weekly liquor delivery despite being college students who, at least for a time, couldn't even legally drink in the club they were managing.
Were these kinds of "technical kids doing increasingly adult (and mundane) things" storylines aided by the fact that most of the cast was famously several years/decades older than the teens they were playing? Yes. Does that make said plotlines any less ridiculous? No.
Vanilla David
Perhaps no pop culture crime of the '90s is greater than the brief period of time in which we insisted that non-threatening white guys with tall hair could be rappers. Their patron saint may well be David Silver, who ran because Vanilla Ice walked, managing to transition his role as West Bev DJ into a record deal — which meant viewers had to spend far too much listening to/watching David rap along the way.
Even though David's dalliance with musical stardom ended when the producer the record label assigned him insisted on releasing a terrible song as his first single, prompting the label to drop him, David still had a record deal! And he still got to play keyboards with Babyface and have sex with an A&R rep in a limo! These are all things that happened to David despite him not yet being 20 and also not talented!
Pile It On
Remember when Dylan's dad was (seemingly) exploded by the mob? Well, before learning his dad was actually alive but after Luke Perry decided to leave the show (which was before he decided to come back later) and needed a big swan song story to ride out, he hatched a complicated plot to get vengeance on his dad's killer by romancing the mobster's daughter, Toni (Rebecca Gayheart), as a way to get close to him. The only problem? Along the way, Dylan fell in love with Toni for real (because of course he did).
After a whirlwind courtship in which Dylan revealed the truth about Toni's father to her and the pair got married, the mobster put out a hit on his newly-minted son-in-law, refusing to let his daughter end up with that stoolie Jack McKay's son. The only problem? The night of the hit, Toni happened to be driving Dylan's signature Porsche for no good (non-plot-related) reason, and thus was killed by her father's own thugs when they shot up the car trying to kill Dylan.
Not only are the plot machinations necessary to put all this into place fairly forced, the fact that Dylan couldn't leave the show without one last twist of the dramatic knife just feels mean. He and Toni could have just rode off into the sunset together! Give the poor guy a break!
Eating Disorder in a Day
The twelfth episode of 90210, "Slumber Party," is often pointed to as one of the first examples of the show's lack of fear to be frank and "real" with its characters. When Brenda hosts a slumber party and one of cool girl Kelly's even cooler friends Amanda (Michele Abrams) crashes the party, things take a dark turn during a game of "Skeletons in the Closet." After Amanda fails to destroy the party by needling everyone into sharing their deep dark secrets (including a genuinely heartbreaking story from Kelly about the first time she had sex) and storms out without her purse, the rest of the girls discover it's packed full of diet pills. When she storms back in to get it, the girls confront her, and she admits to constantly taking pills to keep her weight under control.
The problem with all this is that by the end of the episode, this revealed vulnerability of Amanda has softened everyone's attitudes towards her, and after a series of heart-to-hearts, she rejoins the party in good spirits, joining everyone else in celebratory rounds of ice cream and cookies. See, all it takes to overcome a personality-warping, drug-assisted eating disorder is a brief heart-to-heart with four girls you'll never talk to again — because this is your one-and-only appearance on the show.
90210 would return to the eating disorder well again later in the series, with a more extended plotline involving Kelly also falling prey to diet pills. And while this first foray shows that the young series wasn't afraid to tackle actual issues affecting actual teenagers, its inability to avoid falling into the Very Special Episode trap also shows that the show was still a work in progress.
Dance Dance Revolution
Watching this show as a kid, Brandon was my guy. Steve was a jock, Dylan was way too much of a bad boy, and David hit way too close to home, so I gravitated to well-meaning good guy Brandon. He was generally nice! He was a writer! His car was named Mondale (fun fact: the only state Ronald Reagan lost in the 1984 election was his opponent Walter Mondale's home state of Minnesota)! But as I got older, I began to realize what an insufferable, self-serious, overly-earnest nitwit Brandon is, acting both like his farts don't stink and also that the school newspaper he co-edits with Andrea is the Washington Post and he is Woodward AND Bernstein.
This self-important attitude arguably reached its zenith with the season three episode, "Home and Away," in which Brandon provides a voiceover that is ostensibly text from an editorial he's writing about a football game between West Bev and an inner city school with a majority Black student body, Shaw High, which is cancelled after a gang shooting at Shaw. The cancellation sends Brandon on a journey of discovery in which he realizes, apparently for the first time and despite the show's entire premise, that the students of West Bev live in a privileged white bubble unaware of and untouched by things like metal detectors at schools, gang violence, and racism (this is all despite Brandon having been taught racism by a young Vivica A. Fox in an episode earlier in the season). With the football game cancelled but the accompanying school dance still proceeding, Brandon ends his editorial by inviting everyone at the inner city school to come to the dance in an effort to end racism.
And it works! The inner city kids show up, somehow don't leave immediately upon hearing DJ David Silver's milquetoast rhymes, and after a few tense moments, begin dancing with the upper class teens of West Bev. Brandon and his Shaw counterpart, Jordan, look fondly upon what Brandon has wrought, with Brandon saying he still wants to get the West Bev/Shaw game rescheduled and Shaw saying his deceased friend, slain in the gang shooting, would have enjoyed the dance (which just about says it all when it comes to the different experiences of these two characters). He did it everyone! Brandon solved racism!
Donna Martin Graduates!
Perhaps the most famous 90210 moment is also its most ridiculous. As part of the run up to West Bev’s Senior Prom, a zero tolerance policy for alcohol consumption at the event is presented to the class. When good girl Donna gets drunk on two glasses of champagne at pre-prom events and gets busted at the dance, she is suspended and barred from graduating per the clearly-defined policy.
But the thought of one of the 90210 gang missing graduation prompts budding activists Brandon (that guy again) and Andrea into action, who lead a walkout of the senior and junior classes to march on a school board hearing pertaining to Donna’s case. Their arguments cite such ironclad legal precedents as, “she worked hard to graduate," "she is, usually, good," and "we like her." Somehow, this is enough to get the school board to reverse the decision and allow her to graduate.
Watching it unfold as a preteen, it read like sweet justice against a cruel, uncaring system. As an adult, it reads like a bunch of spoiled brats with no real problems getting mad when one of their own (who happens to be played by the daughter of the show's executive producer) breaks a clearly-established and directly disseminated rule just because they think it shouldn’t apply to her (it also reads a bit like the series producers — children of the '60s — really wanted to do an activism story, but it was the '90s and everything was "great" so good causes were hard to come by and this was the best they could come up with — despite the fact that there's a subplot in the episode about an impending dress code they could have used).
In its way, Donna's dalliance with drunken delinquency is a perfect snapshot of the compelling tension at the heart of Beverly Hills, 90210. The show is often at its best when it takes the problems of teens seriously — but sometimes, the problems of teens just aren't that compelling to a non-teen audience. Particularly when they're problems they bring on themselves by being, well, teens.
