Likewise, there was uncertainty about the show’s ultimate direction early on. There’s an innocence and uncertainty to them about how their lives are about to change in this foreign world. The Walsh kids, Brandon and Brenda, embody this earnestness.
BEVERLY HILLS 90210 SEASON 7 EPISODE 31 SERIES
Created by then 29-year-old wunderkind Darren Star, who would later create 90210 spinoff Melrose Place and the prestigious HBO series Sex and the City, 90210 marked his first foray into television, a side gig he sort of slagged off at first as he was getting steady work writing and rewriting feature films (his lone prior credit on IMDB is for the low budget Cannon film, Doin’ Time on Planet Earth, though he’s mentioned in interviews other films he’d worked on leading up to this first TV gig). It’s been about a decade since I last watched some scattered Beverly Hills, 90210 episodes, and part of the fun of re-living this first season is seeing just how earnest the show was in its earliest iteration, before it settled in to the more melodramatic, young-adult soap we remember.
BEVERLY HILLS 90210 SEASON 7 EPISODE 31 CODE
And boy are they in for a shock! We regular folk in the viewing audience were to live vicariously through the Walsh family – a “normal,” small-town, Midwest clan navigating the plastic superficiality of the richest zip code in America. Along for the ride are his wife, stay-at-home mom Cindy (Carol Potter, Today’s F.B.I., Sunset Beach) and their teenage twins, Brandon (Jason Priestly, Sister Kate, Private Eyes) and Brenda (Shannen Doherty, Heathers, Charmed), sophomores at fictional West Beverly High.
Premiering in fall of 1990 on the still-infant FOX broadcast network (itself launched in ’87), Beverly Hills, 90210 this first season focuses on the Walsh family, implants from Minneapolis, Minnesota, who move to sunny, hoity-toity Beverly Hills after family patriarch Jim Walsh (James Eckhouse, Fatal Attraction, Cocktail) lands a new job in Southern Cali Fon-Eye-Aye. Your purchase helps pay the bills at this website! But it was touted for its realistic depictions of teen life and the social issues surrounding those puberty-filled years, so what was there to be jealous of?Ĭlick to purchase Beverly Hills, 90210: The Complete First Season at Amazon. Wait…no! Every era was a golden age for Aaron Spelling TV, and if you were a teenager in the 1990s, you remember this “golden age” best!īeverly Hills, 90210 premiered about a month after I started my freshman year of high school, and for the next 10 years I looked on as the rich kids of Beverly Hills lived in fancier homes than mine, drove cooler cars than me, threw parties I could only dream of, and got whatever they damn well pleased.