I remember growing up and watching the show mostly at its peak during the mid-90s – around about the time when dorky David Silver’s equally dorky bestie Scott Scanlon accidentally shot himself at his own birthday party playing with a gun (season two); and when airhead Donna Martin supposedly took the modelling world by storm in Paris (season three).
So to watch the very first episode ever was a real timewarp in memory because it’s not an episode I actually remember watching – despite clearly remembering some of the most outrageous episodes that followed.
Sarah Pollok – Gen Z: As a 1997 baby whose favourite films include When Harry Met Sally, Clueless, The Breakfast Club, You’ve Got Mail and Friends (not a film but brilliant), I’m not a stranger to watching and loving things filmed before my time. Yet, the only thing I knew about Beverly Hills 90210 was that it was an area in Los Angeles, so I went into the pilot episode (all 120 minutes of it) with zero expectations and my goodness it was a ride.
Has it aged well?
Dan: Straight off the bat it goes into everything from race relations, when Steve Sanders is audibly perplexed in class at how the Spanish teacher gets paid to “speak her native tongue”; to the socio-economic divide, when it’s revealed Andrea Zuckerman, editor of the school’s newspaper West Beverly Blaze secretly lives out of zone all the way in Van Nuys in the central San Fernando Valley, lamenting to Brandon how “geographically undesirable” she truly is; and the pressures of keeping up with the zip-code’s unrealistic beauty standards, when the popular girls led by queen bee Kelly Taylor are (hilariously) and openly flicking through a cosmetic surgeon’s PAMPHLET (lol) at a party. So it’s aged terribly.
Sarah: The racial diversity is actually surprisingly good for an all-American 90s show. Yes, the main cast is very white but the school itself seems somewhat diverse and Spanish class is a space that presents some of these subtle tensions (although, the deputy principal asking the Spanish teacher on a date set off my ‘abusing authority’ alarm).
The one thing that really hasn’t aged well (understandably) is the technology, which developed at a breakneck pace between 1990 and 2010 (when I was in high school). Even the very first scene is full of devices, or lack of, that seem outdated to me, from Brendan reaching to turn off an alarm clock (not silencing a smartphone alarm), using a remote to switch on a CD player or the dad reading a newspaper and listening to the radio during breakfast (how bucolic!).
Lessons are written on chalkboards instead of whiteboards or smartboards and students roam around the halls with their heads up. News of the big start-of-term party is delivered via plane banner (which is far cooler than a Facebook event but I assume wasn’t the standard) and when people show up, they don’t pose for social media photos but actually dance and endure awkward real-life conversations. Watching this alternate screen-free universe does fill me with rose-tinted nostalgia for a time I only had a brief taste of before smartphones became the norm in year 11; a world where you ask people out in person and write phone numbers on forearms.
However, it is tricky to know whether it’s different because it’s the 90s, it’s American or it’s a television show about Beverly Hills. I do wonder if body-con dresses and heels were typical school attire? If the popular kids actually get nose jobs and drink champagne in hot tubs after riding around on their dad’s motorcycles? Because I can confirm this was not the case in 2010. The result is that I spend the pilot feeling low-key gaslit, uncertain whether this was the high school experience 90s kids really had, an experience Beverley Hills kids still have, or a Hollywood fantasy.
Some of the show’s more emotional elements or themes, however, are timeless; the delight of popular girls paying you attending and the utter cringe of your mum being the strictest of your friends’ parents. Going a little too hard at the house party or navigating moments when the pressure to fit in rubs against your values. Sure, they were wearing different clothes and throwing around different slang (let’s bring back ‘I’m psyched!’) but every kid knows the sting of sitting at a lunch table alone or watching the boy you like fall hard for someone else.
Kim: I had a head cold when I sat down to watch the pilot and, 45 minutes in, took my temperature. Low grade fever. Which totally aligned with what I was seeing (and hearing) on screen. Was the entire 1990s a low-grade fever dream in which we wore more colour than a Cyndi Lauper music video? I too wrote down “psyched” as an excellent word I’d forgotten (along with “nimrod”), but there was so much about the show I was happy to leave in the past.
How did 1991-me not clock, with outrage, that the ONLY reason Kelly and Brenda became friends was that no one wanted a fat girl to sit beside them in chemistry? The social pariah who leads to their meet-cute appears in the credits as, simply, Overweight Girl. (Sarah: I get literal chills imagining the social media take-down that would occur if that were to happen today). Later, Kelly thanks her lucky stars she never lived in Minnesota where the cold would, surely, make her fat. Cue the opening scenes of episode two and Brenda asking her mother how many calories in a slice of kiwifruit. “Twelve!” says Mom, brightly. We’re still five years from the Kate Moss Calvin Klein campaign that will characterise the 1990′s as the era of “heroin chic”, but the warning signs were there.
What really struck me about the opening episodes was how small and self-centred the characters’ issues were. A totalled car, a broken heart, the inability to afford the “right” jeans. To be a teenager today is to worry about all of those things but, also, the end of the world.
The things that really stood out …
Exteriors
Dan: The pilot opens with Casa Walsh. I remember out of everyone’s house on 90210, Casa Walsh was the kind of homely home I wanted to live in – and weirdly still do. The home of twins and Minneapolis’ overachieving transplants Brenda and Brandon was not too intimidating, and having seen the actual home in real life it was interesting to see the series open with an exterior shot of that house and how much it hasn’t changed over the years. Steve’s mansion is also an amazing example of how the era ushered minimalist 90s architecture.
Kim: That opening shot of the Walsh house! I felt such a visceral punch of recognition. And the same with the entranceway to West Beverly High, the school that always looked more like a hotel – complete with parking valets. The thing about the Walsh house that I most remember was the twins had their own bathroom. I’m 54 and have yet to live anywhere with an ensuite.
Music
Sarah: Soundtracks don’t usually stand out to me but the synth-pop music really broke through at times and I think did some leg work in really setting the viewer firmly in the early 90s. It’s ‘throwback’ or ‘retro’ to someone my age but I’m curious to know whether it would feel familiar to another.
Kim: So. Much. Saxophone.
Fashion
Sarah: The cast’s clothing was a rollercoaster of cool, retro and baffling. It’s interesting to see the items that have cycled back into fashion for my generation; the chunky Nike sneakers, baggy mom jeans, jean shorts and school-girl-esque black shoes and white socks. I’m suddenly and shockingly introduced to neon tights under jean shorts (yet to decide whether it’s genius or heinous) alongside more familiar items like fat scrunchies, big shoulder pads and even bigger hair. These kids are also rocking an unusual amount of jewellery that you’d never see on kids these days; dangly earrings and thick headbands, layered necklaces and chunky belts.
Dan: Of course one of the greatest memories of the show is the fashion – it’s a show that basically helped shape the way an entire generation dressed. Some of it hasn’t aged well (bike shorts worn underneath high-waisted denim shorts for example), but overall some of the looks served have done surprisingly well. Steve’s yuppie scum preppy separates at the time the show came out could maybe be considered cringe, but there were several looks that I was drawn to. Plus everyone tucked their polo shirts inside their jeans which I’m totally down for. To start their first day at school, both Brenda and Brandon wore complementary outfits – blue denim jeans, stone colour bomber jackets. We see Shannen Doherty not venturing too far from her preppy staples in the 1988 cult-classic Heathers, but come episode two, we’re on the brink of 90s grunge and a pre-cursor to Clare Danes in my other 90s high-school favourite, My So Called Life (1994) and Party of Five (1994). Here we see Brenda sporting a dull floral print baby-doll dress with leather boots, velvet choker and leather backpack – an outfit formula that no matter what decade, still has a timeless quality. Thankfully Brandon immediately got rid of the feathery mullet from the pilot episode, going for the short back and sides with floppy fringe come episode two and subsequently influencing every man in the 90s to follow suit.
Kim: I sincerely don’t recall my ‘90s outfits being that colourful, but the jewellery absolutely took me back. I had a chunky, multi-strand amber-toned glass bead necklace almost identical to the one Marianne wears to school and any number of earrings and brooches featuring gargantuan faux pearls and loopy chains. Also, Shannen Doherty’s choppy, way-too-short fringe in episode two made me feel a LOT better about some of my own early ‘90s haircut choices.
Parents
Dan: It’s weird for me to think that the age of the parents is around the early to mid 40s. Which is basically a decade I am entering this year. Why did everyone look older? Brenda, Brandon, Dylan, Steve, Andrea all played the part of 16 and 17-year-old teens, but they all look like they’re in their early 30s. “Steve looks like a 50-year-old accountant” said my wife Zoe, who watched this with me.
Sarah: Agree! Off the bat, I thought most ‘kids’ looked like 28-30-year-olds (yet, weirdly, David Silver and Scott Scanlon) but I suppose that’s nothing new in Hollywood ‘High Schools’. What is new, is those supposed 17-year-olds getting nose jobs . . .
Kim: Were there any scenes where Mum was not wearing an apron? And Dad was not in, or about to be in, the office?
The make-up
Kim: Mercifully more subtle than I was expecting but, still, how many colours did it take to fill an eye shadow palette back then?
Andrea was kind of annoying (and so was Brandon)
Dan: Andrea was the underdog in a sea of rich hot people and I remember rooting for her at some stage as an impressionable 7-year old, but looking back at her character now, she really was kind of a pain in the neck. Like, just let everyone get on with being outrageously young and dumb Andrea! They’ll figure it out eventually! (Although maybe this is a sentiment that probably wouldn’t pass today).
Sarah: Andrea’s obsession with getting into a good university (a desire that shapes her entire school experience) marks her as an outsider. But if she was a Gen Z kid, her anxiety about securing a good university/career/income/future wouldn’t be anything special. Prestigious universities are increasingly hard to get into and a good (well-paying) job feels increasingly essential. Yes, Andrea is a bit of a pain, but I resonate with her future-focused panic and inability to just cut loose.
Kim: Notwithstanding the fact that in three decades of journalism I have never once seen an editor with a pencil behind her ear (Andrea in every school newspaper scene) nobody on this show was more annoying than Brandon. The last of the SNAGs (Metrosexuals replaced the Sensitive New Age Guy in the late ‘90s), he believed women had agency, but only when he granted it. In episode one, he gives rich girl Marianne permission to say no to sex. In episode two he gives surfer girl Sarah permission to say no to drinking (and sex). He tells his sister what to wear and Dylan what to do and drives 25 stalkery kilometres to follow Andrea home when she can’t be bothered listening to him. Brandon was the show’s moral compass and, in hindsight, it pointed True Nimrod.
There are no phones
Kim: This is quite good news for the over-50 viewer who struggles to read the text messages that proliferate modern teen television but it was stressful wondering (a) how everybody was going to get home without an Uber app and (b) realising that Brenda had no way of contacting her friends once inside that club. (I did feel a blush of nostalgia when they all grouped around the payphone to call a guy).
Dan: Only phones plugged into a socket of course. And if you didn’t have Insta handles to swap, you did what popular party girl Marianne Moore did – take Brandon’s entire forearm and write your phone number in lipstick. Chic.
Speaking of…
Dan: The motorcycle scene between Brandon and Marianne was weirdly sexual. As was the pool scene where she wants to jump his bones. Cue saxophone. You always knew there was sex scene coming up when the saxophone started playing in the 90s. But Marianne was very sophisticated and advanced for her age, a storyline I wasn’t expecting in the pilot episode. For god’s sake she ate sushi for lunch. Charlie XCX should be paying tribute to Marianne for laying the foundations of this extreme level of Brat behaviour.
Cameos
Dan: Did anyone notice the bouncer at the club was Marvel actor Dijon Djimon Gaston Hounsou? Amazingly he still looks the same today.
Kim: I was compelled to Google “who played Marianne Moore”? Answer: Leslie Rae Bega, probably better known now as Tony Soprano’s mistress, Valentina La Paz.
Sarah: Not going to lie, I have no clue who you are talking about.
Jason x Brenda storyline
Dan: Jason’s apartment was giving American Pyscho … When Brenda hooks up with 25-year-old lawyer Jason Croft he unknowingly takes 16-year-old Brenda to his weird apartment. What was that water feature in the middle of the room? Was his bed actually a waterbed? How hilarious was it seeing his stack of CDs? Also, of all the cocktails Brenda could have ordered, why did she settle on a banana daiquiri!? Weird.
Sarah: The scene in Jason’s apartment was huge ick energy. I was literally curled up with anxiety watching the scene, silently willing Brenda to get out of there. It definitely captured the adolescent desperation of trying to act older than you are, but I feel like the fake IDs already did that. Also, the entire ‘sneaking into the club’ scene was bizarre, with Brenda dressing like a 45-year-old heading to the Opera, the club being full of 40-somethings and her ordering a banana daiquiri? So odd.
Kim: Does it say something about modern television storylines that I was utterly shocked nothing truly, terribly, violent happened to Brenda when she ended up in that apartment? (And, yeah, the relationship was inappropriate but that second date was also the first time I’d seen adults eat spaghetti in a restaurant setting. Fork-spoon-twist. Game changing).
Dylan
Kim: He’s not even in the pilot?! I stayed for episode two. Of course he reads Byron. From an actual book.
The school radio station
Dan: How embarrassing was The Wild Thing segment on the West Beverly High radio station? Interestingly, Brandon was able to take control of the narrative around the rumours of him sleeping with Marianne by declaring publicly on air that nothing happened. These days, people have the option of doing that on social media.
Sarah: It was unusual to see how the rumour of Brandon and Marianne spread, not through texts or group messages but literal word of mouth. Yet, he manages to straighten the narrative out on the school’s radio station, which I suppose is the 90s version of a Notes App apology shared on Instagram stories or an apology video on TikTok.
Kim: You can apologise via a Notes App??
Length
Dan: The pilot was 90 minutes long. Today’s attention span and 20-minute pilots could never handle this level of self indulgence!
Kim: In the 1990s, pilots had to be that long to accommodate the saxophone medleys.
All seasons of Beverly Hills 90210 are available to stream on Prime Video
