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Donna Martin graduates!
In honor of 90210 day
02 Thursday Sep 2010
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Tag Archives: 90210
To push myself back into this
08 Tuesday Dec 2009
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90210, Bitch, Britney Spears, Degrassi: The Next Generation, Fatal Attraction, Flashdance, Glenn Close, Mental illness, movies, Television
Last-ish month, Glenn Close wrote a piece for The Huffington Post on speaking out about mental illness. In it, she discusses her relationship to mental illness, both within the people in her life and the rolls that she’s played. Close is concerned about the treatment of mental illness in popular culture insomuch as that the mentally ill are portrayed as violent, something to be afraid of. She writes about how test audiences for Fatal Attraction felt that Close’s character needed to be punished for being crazy. (Not mentioned in the article, but the treatment of lesbians in popular culture runs a strikingly parallel course. The more you know.)
Close writes,
It is an odd paradox that a society, which can now speak openly and unabashedly about topics that were once unspeakable, still remains largely silent when it comes to mental illness. This month, for example, NFL players are rumbling onto the field in pink cleats and sweatbands to raise awareness about breast cancer. On December 1st, World AIDS Day will engage political and health care leaders from every part of the globe. Illnesses that were once discussed only in hushed tones are now part of healthy conversation and activism.
Yet when it comes to bipolar disorder, post-traumatic stress, schizophrenia or depression, an uncharacteristic coyness takes over. We often say nothing. The mentally ill frighten and embarrass us. And so we marginalize the people who most need our acceptance.
OuyangDan, in a blog post over at Bitch, discusses the public consumption of Britney Spears’s bouts with mental illness. She writes,
Something that the public chewed up was Britney’s bout with mental illness. Anyone who has ever been diagnosed with mental illness can tell you how much they long to keep it private, because mental illness carries with it a social stigma. Any woman who dares reveal to anyone that she has any degree of mental illness runs the risk of having that person use that information against her in the future. We have all heard the story of the Ex who has “Mental Issues” and that is why she is unreasonable and shouldn’t be allowed to have children, you know. But Britney didn’t get to keep her mental illness private in any sense of the word, because every major or respected news organization and Fox followed her every move, because that is what they have always done.
Labor Day weekend when I was sixteen, I sat on the couch in Lindsey’s basement. She, Allison, and I were having an end-of-the-summer sleepover, Flashdance on the TV, open tubs of chocolate frosting and boxes of Teddy Grahams. At nine, I took a little green pill out of my pocket and held it between my fingers. Please, God, let this work, I prayed as I slid the pill into my mouth and swallowed it down with a swig of Cheerwine.
I’ve Please, God, let this work several times since. Thanksgiving morning, I tried again for the first time in four years. Something new, something different. I can feel the rise of panic during my days and the squash of the medication that follows. I’ve spent most of the past week and some change thinking about the mix of creativity and crazy, decisions that need to be made now, decisions that will need to be made later.
Both Glenn Close and OuyangDan are quite right in what they’ve seen with regard to mental illness as represented by popular culture and as ridiculed by the media. But there are also some positives that need to be acknowledged. Aside from Lifetime movies, a favorite go-to especially for eating disorder movies, it’s been my experience that teenage shows are the ones making the gesture to reach out to the mentally ill.
On 90210, we’ve watched as Silver comes to, and deals with, a bipolar diagnosis. Degrassi is probably the bastion of mental illness and teenagers, dealing with depression, cutting, eating disorders, bipolar disorder, PTSD – on and on and on. Problem of the week? Sure. But it gives notice to what people everywhere, not just teenagers, deal with. And I applaud that. Someone has to.
No Drama Adrianna
16 Wednesday Sep 2009
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90210, Beverly Hills 90210, Good clean wholesome fun, Gossip Girl, It's time to grow up now, Kevin Smith, Mallrats, Marketing values to kids, Teenagers and their nondramatic lives, Television, The cool kids
In a horrible turn of events, I don’t get to watch TV on TV this semester. Between work and classes all happening at night, I’m relegated to that awful world of catching shows on the Internet. And if you suck, as the CW does, you take your sweet time making new episodes available on your website, so I fall dramatically behind on issues such as when the hell did Silver become everything Dixon wanted her to be and thus why he broke up with her? (Turns out this question is going as unanswered as “can you describe heteroglossia to me in a way I actually understand?”)
The first couple of episodes of 90210, season two, haven’t been spectacular according to the Internet. It’s not Gossip Girl enough or not Beverly Hills, 90210 enough, or whatever. There was too much giggling and flitting around on the beach. Too much drama. One too many characters declaring no drama. (Dear teenagers everywhere: if you are a person who declares no drama, drama will never go away in your life because you are the one causing it. You’re welcome.)
Surprisingly, I used to watch Beverly Hills, 90210 with my hyper-conservative mother, the same mother who once told me not to watch Kevin Smith movies because once the sin is in your head, it’s never getting out. (I’ll give you the real hint: don’t be eighteen and watching Mallrats with your father because there are few things more awkward than watching the topless psychic scene together.)
(Things you probably could have guessed on your own: which character I most identified with. Good call knocking up the nerd, by the way.)
My first memory of the show: the preview showing Dylan and Kelly in the pool, though, because of the lighting, and pre-HD, you’re not entirely sure if it’s Kelly or Brenda, and whom will Dylan choose? And, sure, there are moments like Donna Martin Graduates that embedded themselves somewhere in the area of my brain that was supposed to contain school information. (Sorry, Mr. K., I couldn’t possibly remember all the countries in Africa.) But the show, as generally remembered, is mostly contained in the racy college years.
(I wouldn’t cry about it if Tori Spelling was shoved fell off her perch.)
When the DVDs started coming out, Matt, Amanda, and I went in for the super marathon, an attempt to relive all great things past.
Here’s what we learned: the first couple of seasons are boring as hell.
Yes, Brenda gives it up on prom night, and Kelly’s mom does some blow, but, as a whole, the show is so tremendously innocuous that it would probably be made by ABC Family today. The first season, especially, with its focus on Brenda, Brandon, and their parents, really makes for a family show. This is also including, but not limited to, the really awkward sexual tension between the parents and their kids.
(“Three-way kiss!”)
So when people piss all over our vehicular-manslaughtering, drug overdosing, manic-depressive, knocked-up, richer than Steve Sanders new gang at West Bev for the moments when they actually act like teenagers, I offer the same thing I say about real teenagers: let them act their age. It’s a show about high school, right? Not badly aging twenty- and thirty-somethings trying to recapture the youth they never actually lost because contemporary culture feeds on the idea of an extended adolescence?
Right.
Can you ever just be whelmed?*
07 Tuesday Jul 2009
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10 Things I Hate About You, 90210, Allison Janney, Almost Famous, American Pie, Ani DiFranco, Can't Hardly Wait, Catcher in the Rye, Girl Interrupted, In a past life, Julia Stiles, Larry Miller, Molly Ringwald, movies, She's All That, Taming of the Shrew, Television, The Bell Jar, The Secret Life of the American Teenager
Road trip time! Destination: 1999.
1999 – I turned sixteen, quit the cheerleading squad, started listening to Ani DiFranco, read The Bell Jar and Catcher in the Rye, started shopping at Hot Topic, and, in a complete non sequitur, got involved in church.
Same year? Enter 10 Things I Hate About You.
I know how difficult it must be for you to overcome all those years of upper middle-class suburban oppression. Must be tough.
If I had to pick just one movie that was released during my high school years to take with me for all time, this is the one.
Not kidding.
Where did you come from? Planet “Loser”?
As opposed to Planet “Look At Me, Look At Me”?
Kat and Bianca? Absolutely, without a doubt, that was me and my sister. So often did we quote lines to each other that it is one of the few things from our adolescence embedded into my dad’s memory. Upon seeing a street advertisement for the new television series of the same name, my dad snapped a picture on his phone and sent it my way. (Definitely a top reason that my dad is awesome.)
Bogey’s party is just a lame excuse for all the idiots at our school to drink beer and rub up against each other in hopes of distracting themselves from the pathetic emptiness of their meaningless consumer-driven lives.
But why make the television show? Especially ten years after the fact? And how on earth do you take that plot (for those of you who fell off a cliff, think Taming of the Shrew. If that means nothing, I can’t really help you), and turn it into an actual series? E! promises me that it’s the best show ABC Family has ever made. I hope that means it’s better and less agenda-driven than The Secret Life of the American Teenager. (Even Molly Ringwald isn’t enough to sustain my interest in that.) Bonus factor of the show: Larry Miller still plays the dad.
What’s normal? Those damn… Dawson’s river kids sleeping in each other’s beds and what not?
So what’s different? First, the Stratford sisters are the new kids (Midwestern transplants to California no less – everyone’s favorite). Bianca is way more calculated in her shallowness (she deconstructed the most popular girl’s Facebook page in order to properly impress her at first meeting) and downright pathetic in her attempts. Kat’s not nearly as gruff – maybe her words are, but the actress lacks Julia Stiles’s mad skills. The guidance counselor is no Allison Janney. They turned Mandella into the token fat girl. Joey and Chastity are the power couple (and Joey is way more bumbling and puppy-like). Lastly, dead mom versus vanished mom.
The problem so far is that this is quickly turning into a show about high school, as opposed to the movie, which was about people who were in high school (a subtle, but important, distinction).
Best line in the pilot, said by the dad to Kat: “Are you talking to me or the democrats in your head?”
Second best, said by Bianca to Kat: “No more NPR, it’s giving me menopause.”
Am I that transparent? I want you, I *need* you, oh baby, oh baby.
(It’s a good thing Patrick came along, lest Kat wind up like our favorite grown women heroines.)
As someone no longer part of that demographic, how might this go over with teen viewers? It’s decidedly not as seizure-inducing as the pace on 90210. If the article on E! is any indication, it’s also not as racy (news flash: possible kiss by the end of the season!). Is there a market for that? Or, should I say, enough of one to sustain the show?
I just like how he’s always leaning. Against stuff. He leans great.
(Totally different quotation source material – My So-Called Life – but if that picture’s not homage, I don’t know what is.)
Now I’m also curious as to what other decade-old movies could be mined for television. She’s All That, Can’t Hardly Wait, and American Pie are the first that come to mind. Or, in another direction, Almost Famous and Girl, Interrupted. (Are you really telling me you wouldn’t watch a show about a mental hospital?)
Two questions for you: 1) Did you watch the show tonight? 2) What’s your favorite movie from high school?
*I think you can in Europe.
Put a note on my chair
09 Tuesday Jun 2009
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90210, Beverly Hills 90210, Burns and Allen, Degrassi Junior High, Degrassi: The Next Generation, Dustin Diamond, Elizabeth Berkley, Family Ties, Francine Pascal, Gossip Girl, Lark Voorhies, Mario López, Mark-Paul Gosselaar, Melrose Place, Mental Floss, Murphy Brown, Old Time Radio, One Day at a Time, Saved by the Bell, Saved by the Bell: The New Class, Sweet Valley High, Television, The Golden Girls, The lasting power of popularity, The Office, Tiffani Thiessen
Please, please, please watch the best nine and a half minutes of television since Jessie Spano became addicted to caffeine pills.
I really hope you watched. If you’re awesome, you’ll still be laughing until sometime tomorrow.
“If you don’t get rid of Linda, I’m gonna throw her out the winda.”
While flipping my way through various fads, I sometimes wonder about what’s going to last. Saved by the Bell managed to hit the intersection of contemporary (those clothes!), timeless (the power of friendship in high school, chasing after the girl of your dreams, etcetera), popularity (how many people watched it at the time), and campiness (a nice way of saying it wasn’t the most well written show on television). The latter, I think, is what sells the show in syndication. People my age watch it because we’ve always watched it; people my seventeen-year-old sister’s age watch it because it’s just that ridiculous (and because they have big sisters who make sure they know just how fabulous the show is).
“Hey, mama, wanna have a burger with a real man?”
A while back, one of the morning shows had a series of cast reunions for shows such as Family Ties, Murphy Brown, and One Day at a Time. As far as I know, Old Time Radio shows never got this same courtesy, perhaps because radio died out before the shows did or they simply moved to television (for example, Burns and Allen). Bands have reunion tours (some of them a little too often for it to count). Books don’t get any kind of reunion, though, if Francine Pascal ever comes through on the latest Sweet Valley series, we’ll get to see the old crew as grownups in a gated community. As far as I know, movies don’t get segments where everyone is kind of ragged from spending all the money they made.
“I’m so excited. I’m so…scared.”
Saved by the Bell: The New Class lasted a little longer than the original series, but it interestingly began right after the first class graduated. I wonder how it might fare now in light of other pseudo-remakes. Degrassi: The Next Generation waited until Emma, born to a fourteen-year-old Spike in season one of Degrassi Junior High was old enough to start middle school herself. 90210 made its reappearance this year, though something’s missing that I can’t quite name; something about it has a not-so-fresh feeling. Come fall, we’ll get to see how well the new Melrose Place goes over.
“I’m leaving, too! I’ll send for my ant farm.”
There’s something endearing about the innocence of Saved by the Bell. The easy early-‘90s morality, the laugh track, the ooOOoo when Slater kissed Jessie on the cheek. Even compared to shows like Degrassi Junior High, which ran approximately at the same time, it already seemed dated. And, once you got over that first time Valerie smoked pot in the windowsill on Beverly Hills 90210, it’s fairly apparent that Tiffany Thiessen plays bad girl much better than she does sunshine-laden Kelly (plus the boob increase didn’t hurt).
“I do love you, Zack. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Not for us.”
What shows today – I would say teen shows, but Melrose Place throws that theory a bit – could show up again in ten years? Gossip Girl becomes Gossip Woman? The Office becomes The Retirement Home? (Actually, go ahead and make that one. It could be like The Golden Girls, but, of course, never as good as The Golden Girls.) I wonder if producers making shows now think ahead to the concept, planting characters who could be in the right place at the right time a decade from now.
“Then make it official, just like my seat in detention.”
Just for fun, take some time for these quizzes. I aced the first one, but missed a few on the second (clearly, I need to start watching my DVDs again!). How did you do?
