LynneSin reviews Season #1 of Beverly Hills 90210

[LynneSin]

I use to watch this show all the time when it was in first run but never really got into it until about the 5 or 6th season. Lately; however, I started watching the reruns on Soap Net.

As a lark I found that the entire first season of Beverly Hills 90210 is on Youtube. It's about 5 Youtube videos per episode. Since I have never seen much of season #1, I started watching an episode about every other night before I went to bed. Since there was no opening credits or commercials, each episode was about 40-45 minutes.

In a nutshell, I question how this show lasted after one season. It was absolutely wretched and nothing more than a weekly ABC afterschool special on nightime TV. All 7 of the original characters, plus the parents and Nat of the Peach Pit, were in the shows but Donna and David were nothing more than bit players with the Jim & Cindy Walsh (the parents of twins Brandon and Brenda) having a bigger part in the series.

Each week we would have episodes like "Brandon meets a homeless kid" or "Kelly deals with her mom's drug addiction" - a problem was introduced at the beginning of the show and nicely wrapped up with a 'happily ever after' by the time the show ended. Each week they tackled such hot teen topics as Diet-Pill addiction, Dyslexia, Breast Cancer (Brenda found a lump but by the end of the show it was all resolved), Cheating, teen sex and even AIDs. Probably the worst of Season #1 was "Seventeen Year Itch" where Mom Cindy runs into an old high school flames and comes close to cheating.

I have been working on season #2 and they still have the single topical issue per show but you can see where they realize that making the show more of a 'nighttime soap opera' with episodes that carried story-lines over several weeks. I think the writers also realized that giving major storylines to the adults usually created a bad show: The Walsh Parents and Nat were relegated to nothing more than sounding boards for the kids and those annoying parents with strict rules.

Still, Beverly Hills 90210 was a great series even if it was campy at times. Getting thru the awful first season and finding their niche created one of the most popular TV shows on Fox Network.

[Flaxbee]

1. some of my grad school friends would gather every week

for 90210 (and some of them lived in the zip code, too). They all loved it for its camp; I actually have never seen a full episode. Just one of those shows that never appealed to me, like Friends or Seinfeld.

Are you going to go through all of the seasons?

[kwassa]

2. I walked down the aisle arm-in-arm with Jenny Garth.

from six inches away she was .... unbelievably gorgeous.

Why me? I was doing service as an usher at a church in LA. She was attending a christening of a friend's baby. They told me to look for her. I said "What does she look like?" They stared at me as if I was the most ignorant person on earth. I had no idea who she was.

This is when the show was at its peak.