The _Beverly Hills 90210_ thread

omg this one

http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lami4rPDFc1qzozj1.jpg

Surm u watching the new season?

The second episode of the new season is where my wife and I finally threw in the towel. Its just too ridiculous at this point.

I mean, it always kinda has been, but the lame excuse for Liam to buy the bar, making the black kid the one who drops out of college and gets addicted to pills, and the fucking pig dinner were just all ugh, can no longer waste my time on this shit.

haha can't say i blame ya

i have to say that i threw in the towel a bunch of episodes ago. it was like ... the writing is just ...

but i watched an episode the other night and naomi clark is just ...

perfect.

^^^^^ exactly why I keep watching

yeah sometimes there's that shining star

listen, i'm watching the old 90210 now. valerie's in jail.

for smothering Jim and Cindy Walsh with a Guess? sweater.

what the world was waiting for

She lost her virginity upon being date raped. She was almost burned alive at a rave, and later developed a coke habit of her own which she went to rehab for, then was stalked and almost killed by her roommate. Kelly became unexpectedly pregnant before having a miscarriage and told she may never carry a child to term. She was shot during a drive-by shooting at LAX and suffered amnesia. She was raped in an alley and later shot the rapist, with the police clearing her on grounds of self-defense.

Steve Sanders is almost 50!?!?

Oy

"We had shirtlessness on 90210"
GASP
Chippendales? More like Dudes Gone Lame

btw I have a very clear memory of every kelly scene in mizzells post.

She lost her virginity upon being date raped. She was almost burned alive at a rave, and later developed a coke habit of her own which she went to rehab for, then was stalked and almost killed by her roommate. Kelly became unexpectedly pregnant before having a miscarriage and told she may never carry a child to term. She was shot during a drive-by shooting at LAX and suffered amnesia. She was raped in an alley and later shot the rapist, with the police clearing her on grounds of self-defense.

which Joyce Carol Oates story is this?

I am enjoying rewatching this show as a kind of inversion of Twin Peaks (the only other non-sitcom show about teens on TV at the time), it's so goddamn ridiculous

It hews closely to realism for the first three seasons. It turns into a Melrose Place knockoff after 1993.

idk if knockoff is really the right term there

MP was a 92010 spinoff, then outdid in the Dynasty claptrap. 90210 had to compete.

90210 is also pretty much a "trauma/issue of the week" show right from the beginning - Dylan's in AA, Kelly gets raped, Brandon gets drunk for the first time and crashes a car, Brandon has to talk a classmate out of killing himself, Brenda has a pregnancy scare etc etc. melodrama was it's core modus operandi.

oh no doubt but it took a few years for Kelly's lesbian paramour to burn down her house.

haha lookin forward to that. also Dylan's gangster hitman plot, which I had totally forgotten about

there's so much

Valerie is the best thing that ever happened to this show besides maybe baby Brenda or Dylan-stealing Kelly

or Tori's acting when she gets pushed down the stairs

last night I annoyed my wife w an extended comparison between "let Donna Martin graduate" partisans and Trump voters

BHHAHHAHAHA

I can see Alfred's point that past season 3 or so the unlikely scenarios and "everybody gets a trauma!" plotting begin to pile-up to ridiculous degrees. Like, Brenda having a pregnancy scare (however contrived and telegraphed) in season 1 is not really outside the bounds of normal teenage experience, as opposed to being caught in the middle of a mob war with exploding boats and shit.

does anyone ever get amnesia on this show? or come back from the dead? (pretty sure both things happened on Melrose Place iirc)

the Brenda pregnancy scare was persuasive, actually. That's the summer when the show took off.

omg in S2 ep 4 Kelly is complaining about David's dad dating her mother and she says... "it's like something out of a David Lynch movie"

zeitgeisty!

Mel is so gross with that mullet.

"I can't keep my hands off women."

huh so we got to the "Brandon dates a racist" arc in season 3 and I was actually kind of struck by how well it was handled/depicted (in contrast to the S1 "Brandon meets a black neighbor" episode). His girlfriend drops a number of snide comments - no n-words or overt slurs but plenty of subtle shade-throwing at Brandon's black boss, homeless people, etc. The last straw for Brandon is (of course) when she says some snarky anti-semitic shit about Andrea behind her back. Brandon actually references the Rodney King riots (and not even for the first time!), calls himself "a liberal kind of person", and, after initially trying to say he's willing to set aside their political differences, tells her to get lost and that it doesn't matter how well they get along, how attracted they are to each other. I had totally forgotten this storyline, was kind of surprising that it wasn't as super-clumsy as some of the other contemporary references.

you fuck with the Zuckerman, you fuck with Brandon

however there will under no circumstances be a Brandon fucking a Zuckerman

don't fuck a Zuck

episode also featured the debut of David Silver's musical career, which is so awesomely painful to witness

AH-ndrea Zuckerman.

Season 4 and everyone's in college, cast expands, and the writing really starts to devolve into separate who-is-getting-down-with-who storylines that don't have much to do with each other. There isn't even a central storyline for each episode, just this v soap-opera-ish devotion of equal time to everybody's dumbshit storylines.

Still entertaining for the general tone deafness of it all, the clumsy cultural signifiers, the occasional random guest star ("oh hey that guy shows up on Mad Men"), and the intermittent "issue" episodes (Take Back the Night! Are Sororities Really Anti-Semitic? etc.)

Also a huge chunk of the male cast is devoted to predatory sexual behavior (glaring exceptions being David and Brandon), I'm not entirely sure it's intentional but it sure is fucking creepy.

Dylan is still a reliably hilarious character - a selfish, entitled, aimless millionaire committed to a one-dimensional "literary rebel" persona (he likes Rimbaud AND Kerouac!)

and Brandon found a volume of Byron in his back seat!

Dylan was reading Byron in third grade before it was "cool" iirc

Things Dylan did prior to the start of the show:
- had a drinking problem/joined AA
- raced cars
- rode horses
- had lots of sex
- hung out with mobsters

y'know, average teenage millionaire stuff

Ugh, so many boat anchor plots dragging down season 4 - anything with Emily Valentine, Brenda getting all woke.

I have opinions about this "Take Back the Night" episode in season 4.

The show is generally hit-or-miss when it comes to acknowledging contemporary issues but man did this one really irritate me with its reactionary framing. Steve has a one-night stand at the frat house with some walk-on freshman character who subsequently pesters him/follows him around thinking their fling meant something, and then when she is rebuffed she finds herself swept up in the rhetoric about sexual assault and accuses Steve of being a rapist. The whole way this plot is set up is so awful - it ostensibly introduces the political rhetoric and POV of sexual assault victims, but places them in the mouths of characters that the viewers will inherently find untrustworthy (the freshman, the opportunistic black Student Senate leader who previously gave Brendan crap for not being committed enough, etc.). The whole episode hinges on Kelly at first taking the freshman's side but then refusing to believe her when she finds out the sexual predator in question is Steve, who "couldn't possibly be a rapist". Combined with the show's repeated instances of portraying various male leads' sexually aggressive behavior as harmless, romantic, comedic, etc. it reinforces this dynamic of guys being excused for casual misogyny, stalking, emotional abuse.

dude it's Steve

I know I know

Dylan is still a reliably hilarious character - a selfish, entitled, aimless millionaire committed to a one-dimensional "literary rebel" persona (he likes Rimbaud AND Kerouac!)

― Οὖτις, Friday, September 8, 2017 5:48 PM (three days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

but cmon he is so dreamy

https://images.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fmedia.giphy.com%2Fmedia%2FDSPw8tgB4X8LS%2Fgiphy.gif&f=1

knee deep in season 4 and I may have hit my limit early with the most egregiously awful episode to-date, the episode where Brenda finds a teenage girl's diary from the 60s. The entire episode consists of Brenda imagining the gang acting out the events in the diary, complete with bad wigs, cringeworthy dialogue (it feels like every other line is a period-appropriate song title/lyric reference), and the laziest plotting imaginable.

I was planning on watching up through the episode where Donna gets pushed down the stairs by her abusive rocker boyfriend but this may have been a bridge to far.

it's clearly a filler episode but nothing is really played for laughs and the boomer 60s shit is cliched beyond belief. on the plus side, Brendan plays the gung ho ROTC recruit (in Robert McNamara drag) that signs up for Vietnam duty and promptly gets killed.