Before there was a Capeside creek, a hill with one tree or a summer when anyone turned pretty, there was the O.G. teen drama, Beverly Hills, 90210. This show walked so Riverdale could run…off the rails. And it was the greatest thing to happen to TV for an entire generation.
Earlier this month, the endless blessing that gave the world some of the best TV Guide Magazine covers, generated miles of fodder for the tabloids and turned the nascent Fox network into a must-see spot turned 35 years old. Yep, on October 4, 1990, Minnesota twins Brandon and Brenda Walsh moved to the iconic zip code with mom Cindy and dad Jim, and promptly fell in with the in-est crowd broadcast television had ever seen. And today, Paramount Home Entertainment is releasing all 10 seasons and a complete-series bundle on Digital in 4K UHD for the first time. Even perma-grouse and parade-float arsonist Emily Valentine would be happy about that.
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“For me, it was an amazing experience, even if it [turned out to be] a one-off, which I think a lot of the cast had that same feeling,” recalls show creator Darren Star of the Tim Hunter-directed pilot that started it all. “We didn’t have big expectations — although I actually did, honestly. I just had a really good feeling about it because I felt like there wasn’t anything like it on television. It felt special to me.”
During a recent chat with Star, Ian Ziering (who played Steve Sanders), and Gabrielle Carteris (who played Andrea Zuckerman), the trio reflected on the show’s lasting legacy, as well as their early apprehensions. Star confessed that, while he had a good feeling about 90210‘s chances, some of the cast wasn’t so sure. “[They] were like, ‘We just thought this was going to be a one-and-done!’”
Little did they know what was to come. Because what Star had created was about to tap into the underserved youth market with a soapy, stylish series that told mini-morality tales wrapped up in brooding loner hunks, covetable fashions, and a setting viewers of any age could relate to: the drama-flooded halls of high school.
© Aaron Spelling Prod. / Courtesy: Everett Collection
“An executive at Tristar by the name of Paul Stupin became head of drama at Fox,” says Star. “I had done a project over at Tristar and he remembered me, so he called—this is when I was like 27—and said, ‘Would you be interested in writing a show about high school in Beverly Hills?’”
“I had never thought about television,” continues Star, who had until then been working as a screenwriter for features. However, he was intrigued enough by the offer—and the fact that Fox was edgier than your average network—to whip up a script called The Class of Beverly Hills about a clique of students at Los Angeles’ real-life Beverly Hills High School that ultimately landed him a meeting with one of the industry’s giants. “I went in and pitched it to Fox as a thirtysomething for teenagers and everything would be sort of told through the point-of-view of teenagers. We would see the whole world through their eyes and what’s meaningful to them. I felt like there hadn’t been a relevant show for teenagers. The John Hughes movies, like The Breakfast Club, were doing it, but nothing in television was approaching that.”
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“Fox had an outstanding pilot of commitment with [producer] Aaron Spelling, so they put us together. I met him at his house and we hit it off. He read my script, saw my movie Doing Time on Planet Earth, which honestly, I can’t believe he would hire me after seeing that, but he did!” Star says.
With Spelling on board and the concept cemented, Fox picked it up and Star set about turning The Class of Beverly Hills into a two-hour movie, which was actually quite common for series premieres back then. The longer format also appealed to Star’s film work, “so it was a little more familiar to me.” The only hitch was the actual title: “The Fox network mistakenly thought they had the rights to the name ‘Beverly Hills High,’ but they didn’t. That’s why we always called it West Beverly. And we had to take pains in every episode to differentiate West Beverly High from the actual Beverly Hills High.”
After that, Star, Spelling and Fox went about casting and despite rumors of several celebs who allegedly auditioned, Star can’t remember any big names breaking down their doors. “I would love to see those lists because I don’t really recall. Nobody was famous at the time, so they were just people coming in to audition. I remember that we were down to the wire casting Jason Priestley for Brandon. But Shannen [Doherty] was cast pretty early on.”
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For the actors who did wind up on 90210, the show was obviously a life-changing experience. “I remember it suddenly being everywhere,” offers Carteris, who revealed that the early attention on certain breakout cast members mirrored her own experiences. “Andrea was always sort of the outsider and I think to this day, I feel like that a lot,” she says with a laugh when asked about her character originally being largely sequestered from the Brenda-Kelly-Donna of it all. That changed with the first season’s 13th episode, “The Slumber Party.” Not only was that hour our first look at Jennie Garth‘s emotional range as Kelly painfully recounted the traumatic loss of her virginity during a nasty round of truth-or-dare, but it was also Andrea’s unofficial debut as one of the girls. “That was the first time I felt like a part of something,” Carteris admits.
For Ziering, the idea of playing bro-y nepo baby Steve Sanders was a double-edged sword that first season. On the one hand, he got to have all the fun that came with “the product of poor parenting,” the actor laughs. On the other, “it was sort of one-note.” It wasn’t until Star and the other writers began to dig deeper into the supporting characters (like the sleepover for Kelly and David’s reaction to buddy Scott’s gun-related death in Season 2) that Ziering got to stretch beyond that Sanders smile, the flashy car, and his rich-kid entitlement. “Even I was like, is this all? And then they came up with the fact that he was adopted.”
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As the show slowly grew in the ratings, so, too, did their chances to develop more layers to the roles, as Star and company churned out script after script, including the game-changing Beverly Hills Beach Club summer episodes.
“What happened was the reruns started to perform better than the originals, which is really unusual,” Star proudly points out. “And then we met with the Fox executives and they said, ‘Well, we have good news and bad news. The good news is the show is doing well, we want to pick it up. But the bad news is, we want these episodes to air in the summer.’ And this must have been the beginning of April, which meant we had to go back into production in a month.”
That meant Star and Chuck Rosen, who was running the show with him, had to get cracking immediately. “Chuck had young kids and he had a spring vacation planned at the Four Seasons in Maui,” Star says. “I went with them so I could sit by the pool during the day and break our stories because that was the only way it was going to happen.” First on the to-do list was to address a concern the network had with one of the freshman drama’s most controversial storylines.
“The one thing that I remember in a big way was that Dylan and Brenda slept together at the spring dance. Brenda had sex for the first time, she lost her virginity, she was happy about it, and her friends celebrated at the end of the episode. The show was still a little under the radar, but I think the network woke up to the fact that people were watching the show because the affiliates were just so upset that the show was supposedly glorifying teen sex,” Star explains. “So the first episode of the second season was about Brenda regretting that and realizing that she was too young to have sex. That was something that the network was really insistent on.”
What wasn’t pre-ordained, Star notes, was the evolution of Team Brenda and Team Kelly. Borne of the love triangle between Doherty’s Brenda, Luke Perry‘s Dylan, and Garth’s Kelly, the fandom was fractured by Brenda and Dylan’s breakup, his subsequent hook-up with Kelly, and their now-legendary confession to Brenda in an L.A. park. Nor was it influenced by the much-discussed behind-the-scenes dramas that eventually led to Doherty’s departure from the series. “We never meant to [create division],” Star assured us. “You never do that. We weren’t necessarily doing that in any kind of way, we weren’t writing towards that in any kind of thoughtful way. I think that’s the audience that sort of makes that happen. And I always such a huge fan of Shannen as a person. She helped make the show what it is, and yeah, I missed seeing her on the series, but more than that, I miss her. It’s just such a loss that she’s gone.”
Jeff Katz / TV Guide / Fox Network / Courtesy Everett Collection
Now that 90210 is finally available with all 293 episodes having been fully remastered in 4K Ultra High Definition, sourced from original film elements and tricked out with enhanced color grading, modern sound remastering, and updated aspect ratios, fans can revisit every one of their favorite moments at the press of a button. For Ziering, who remained with the show for its entire run, that includes Season 1’s 16th episode, “Fame is Where You Find It.”
“I loved Shannen as Laverne,” he readily reveals of the late Doherty’s comic turn as the brassy Peach Pit waitress. “It wasn’t even a Steve episode. She was just so funny and so committed!” For Carteris, with 141 episodes under her belt (she exited after the fifth season), picking her favorite episode is impossible. “Over so much time, it’s pieces, not episodes, for me.”
And Star? Having created the spin-off Melrose Place, Sex & the City, Younger, and Emily in Paris since leaving the zip code after Season 5, he’s sort of been busy. “I haven’t rewatched it for a while, but when I’ve done it…first of all, I don’t remember having written any of it. So when I am watching it, it’s something fresh and new and I’m kind of being surprised with all the plot twists! Even episodes I wrote, I have zero recollection of what happens and I’m like, ‘Wow!’ I get why it worked and I see that it still works. And I think the cast is terrific, so it’s really fun for me to go and do that once in a while.”
Beverly Hills, 90210, now available on Apple TV, Amazon and Fandango.