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BEVERLY HILLS 90210
Season One
Review by Mark Wiechman
Stars: Jason Priestly, Shannen Doherty, Ian Ziering, Luke
Perry, Jennie Garth, Brian Austin Green, Tori Spelling, Douglas Emerson
Video: Color Full Screen
Audio: Dolby Digital 2.0
Studio: CBS DVD
Features: See Review
Length: Six Discs
Release date: November 7, 2006
“Everyone’s so Beverly Hills!”
“Brandon, we are Beverly Hills.”
“You’re really nice.”
“Yeah, well, I’m from out of town.”
Show ***
It’s funny how so many television shows are so widely loved and make such an
impression on so many people. Yet other shows, which may have been more
critically acclaimed or even more successful, practically disappear without a
trace when they are canceled. The Brady Bunch is one of the most
universally ridiculed and criticized shows, even by its own cast, yet it
actually became more and more popular over the years in syndication. I doubt
there are very many readers who can’t name every character and rehash at least
ten of the best known plot lines. The original Star Trek appealed to a
wide audience but
this was not known until after the show was already going to be axed, yet the
show has only gained in popularity and could be counted as one of the world’s
religions. Really.
Considering how valuable the young audiences are to advertisers, it is
surprising how few teen dramas have been made, let alone any that are really
interesting or innovative. I have never understood the appeal of sleepy shows
such as Dawson’s Creek, One Tree Hill or Smallville, nor the
silliness of Saved by the Bell or The Fresh Prince of Belle Air
but maybe that’s because I was spoiled by the Beverly Hills brats first.
In the late 1980s teens faced so many new issues that their parents really did
not have to deal with, and a new teen show was appropriate for the era.
The Viet Nam war, free love, and casual drug use were not even a distant memory
to that generation, but AIDS and other issues that faced my generation were
being largely ignored by the media and television. The late 80s generation
liked money and was very interested in saving the world, but not by dropping
out. They wanted to party and get involved and saw money as a good thing and a
means to fix problems, not the problem itself.
How fitting that the new teen show was about rich spoiled teens
which had the same problems everyone else did, and faced new problems of sex and
drug use that prior shows never touched. In this show, the parents often have
the problems as much as or more than the children, which is so often the case in
real life. And they find that money, as Don Henley would say, does not solve
problems, it just changes them. No
character shows this more than one of the most interesting characters, Dylan
McKay, played by Luke Perry who was only in the cast at the insistence of
Spelling himself and who plays the James Dean-like rich boy to perfection.
And of course, like, the way coolest thing about Beverly Hills 90210 is
that it was TOTALLY set in California!! Where the heck were the Bradys from,
anyway? That show was almost intentionally set against the times, like a
Carpenters tune, but 90210 was very much of the times, like a teen Knots
Landing. They have a DJ over the intercom in the morning, for crying out
loud! And it was edgy from the very beginning, with sweet innocent Brenda
getting a fake ID, going to a club, meeting an older man, lying about her age,
and deciding to sleep with him after a few dates, then losing him when she
admits her age, all in the two-hour pilot.
It was another hit from Aaron Spelling and one of the first projects from rising
production star Darren Star, who would see his biggest success without Spelling
in HBO’s Sex and the City. 90210 was an experiment in showing
that most young people have similar problems with sex, drugs, peer pressure, and
fitting in. We all wish we had the financial resources that many of these young
people in Beverly Hills had, but that was really just the window dressing. The
show was fun escapism, but more like a teen soap than prior shows.
We had the star-crossed lovers Brenda (Shannon Doherty) and Dylan (Luke Perry), the pretty boys Brandon (Jason Priestly) and Steve (Ian Ziering) as well as princesses Kelly (Jennie Garth) and Donna (Tori Spelling). Tori Spelling by the way may never win an Oscar but was not really a bad actress at all and held her own on this show just fine. But like most good television shows, the stereotypes were just outlines of real people, who we came to admire and wish success for week after week.
Video ***1/2
Just a bit washed out but no artifacts I could see, and surely
the slightly washed appearance is just due to the technology of the time.
Nothing to be ashamed of.
Audio ***
Only stereo, alas. Background music can be heard fine, but the dialogue is never lost, and my favorite moment might be when car doors are slammed and we hear the door on the left side of the screen coming out of the left speaker and the right side door come out of the right speaker (I had my headphones on to be sure).
Features **1/2
“Beginnings with Darren Star” is very brief, less than ten
minutes, but he compliments the cast and mentions that issues about which
parents “buried their heads in the sand” as he puts it became very important
very quickly. He also admits that he was very young when he created the
show and so high school was all he knew. He felt that parents often watched the
show to find out what their teens were thinking. He discusses the episode
“Spring Dance” in which Dylan and Brenda slept together and how it caused such
uproar, partly because Brenda was not ashamed of anything.
“Meet the Class of West Beverly High” is a string of vignettes from the season
for each character, but the frustrating thing about watching it is that you have
to choose the part for the character’s vignettes, then the “Behind the scenes”
part, then the “Stats” part, then move on to the next character. You can’t
chose “All” for any one person nor for all of the cast members or characters.
It’s hardly the end of the world, but the menu authors should have known better.
“90210 Behind-the-Scenes Featurette is very brief but fun, not so much a true
behind the scenes special but more of the typical promo seen on Entertainment
Tonight.
Some episodes have commentary by Darren Star, who is not the most interesting
dude in the world but he is quite candid about what went right and what did
not. He provides insight into the Spring Dance episode which was the first one
he ever directed, and which he also wrote. He admits that he did not know what
he was doing and that the folks at standards at Fox did not pay much attention
to it at the time, but the affiliates got very angry about it all, which is
pretty funny since high schoolers having sex after the prom happens all the time
but apparently no one had ever depicted it on television so casually and
realistically before. Star states that he simply was trying to show life more
the way life really was, without judgments.
Looking Back: Season One (The Recap) is very lame; it is nothing more than text
on an image of a torn out sheet of paper which summarizes each episode. I
expected it to be a brief visual montage of each episode or the overall season
at least. Such things must exist in the vaults somewhere.
Summary:
What took so long? Maybe they were preparing and cleaning up the original tapes
a bit. We could have used longer and better behind the scenes features, but
they do have nine more seasons to be released, so maybe more will come along.
Shannon looks so great. For better or worse, Jason is even prettier. But then,
it is Southern California. When can I get the next nine seasons and relive the
childhood I never had, please?