In honor of International 9.02.10 Day, a trip into the archives with Dylan and his fugly duster. I also recapped the pilot for TWoP, if you think you can take it (or read Wing’s version for Sling right here). Enjoy! (You are so precious to meeeee.)

First of all, I’d like to apologize to my TiVo for whatever I did to offend it, because it keeps recording the weekend-morning block of old-school 90210 episodes on F/X, and I have absolutely NO IDEA why it would do that — or why it would climb down off its little shelf above the DVD player, tie me up, Clockwork Orange my eyelids with unbent paper clips, and force me to watch every minute of all of those episodes while training a pearl-handled derringer on the back of my head. Why, TiVo? WHYEEEEE??

No, I didn’t suppose you’d buy that. Sigh. All right, but — seriously? I can’t stop watching the 90210 reruns. Can. Not. Stop. I would compare the experience to a train wreck, but in the event of an actual train wreck, I’d like to think I could summon up an emotion more sympathetic than “squirming contempt” on behalf of its victims, and furthermore, I don’t remember the last time a train carrying Vanilla Ice and seventeen gallons of Dippity Do crashed into Contempo Casuals, so that metaphor is out.

Beverly Hills, 90210 is bad. It is incredibly, comprehension-defyingly, Plato’s-conceptual-cave-original-“bad” bad. That the show is bad is in itself hardly news; I watched these episodes when they originally aired, and I understood at that time that the show sucked, but back then, I could manage to sit through an entire episode without hiding my face in a pillow, clamping a hand over my face and peering apprehensively through my fingers, Livia Soprano-ing for the Lord to take me now, or cringing so forcefully that I sprained my neck. The show is not just “bad,” you see. “Bad” does not begin to cover it. “Bad” cannot touch the hem of 90210‘s garment. We do not have a word in the English language that can convey the depth and breadth of the horrors — political, cultural, sartorial, medical — perpetrated in every episode by 90210. “Bad”? Not even close. “So enduringly, fantastically appalling in every aspect that the viewer feels a visceral unease that recalls the unpleasant experience of walking in on one’s parents Doing It”? Closer.

Leaving aside for a moment the sad truth that the show has not aged well, I — actually, now that I think about it, I should address that sad truth. I can think of many shows that I used to enjoy back in the day in spite of the exodus of IQ points they caused, shows like Knight Rider that, although they continued to exhibit all the qualities of ass, had also acquired a patina of quaintness with the passage of time. Watching vintage Knight Rider now, I find that the nostalgia cancels out the shame (well, almost). Not so 90210, and the “fashion” of the early nineties — an era that permitted teal not only to exist but to thrive unchecked — is a primary aggravating factor, and while I myself owned a floral romper with shoulder pads from the Limited during that dark age, I do not need a televised reminder of that particular tragedy, thank you very much. Nor do I need quite that much information about the groins of the young men in the credits, and I sincerely hope that the sadistic individual responsible for putting Ian Ziering in a skin-tight pair of Guess? jeans in almost every episode — not to mention the Guido tank tops that inflicted his nipples and ‘roid lats on a world unprepared for the spectacle of fuzzy man-boobs — has learned in the intervening years that color-blocked silk shirts are friends to no one. Especially not to Brian Austin Green, and especially not sized for David Byrne. The kid is plenty annoying on his own; I don’t see any need to add a size-70 referee-striped jacket to the mix.

And speaking of the mix…before I lead the readership, Vergil-like, into the cavernous hell of 90210 men’s hair-“dos,” I’d like to take a moment to discuss David Silver’s “music,” specifically the keyboard-errific puts-the-“ACK”-back-in-“Muzak” noodling of the Summer Of Deception episodes, in which young Silver programs his electronic keyboard to begin the beguine and then executes a series of Breakin’ 3: Electric Fricassee spin moves behind the deck that James Brown should have kicked him to death for daring to attempt. Undergoing a Pap smear is both more comfortable and more melodious than witnessing the horror of David’s inept flails in the direction of “freestyle,” but the show is not content to hold our heads under the water of the twerp-core genre. No, we must also behold the rest of the cast feigning admiration for David’s “talent.” Acting-wise, the rest of the cast is, to understate the case rather impressively, not really up to the task, given that many of them have difficulty expressing concepts like “conscious” and “vertical,” but even Olivier would have barfed into his hand after three bars of Flavorless Flav. The sight of James Eckhouse and Cindy Potter bobbing their heads as David performs at the end-of-summer clambake, their faces depicting an unsettling mix of mandatory enthusiasm and utter confusion and despair, brings to mind “after” photos from the Heaven’s Gate compound. When recurring guest star Nikki overhears David practicing and exclaims, “Great sound!” I waited the better part of half an hour for the declarative statement that must surely follow, to the effect that the earth is flat. It never came. Instead, Nikki macked on David; I went online, bought a barbecue fork at the Williams Sonoma website, had it expressed to my apartment, signed for it, and gouged out all of my senses.

The ridiculous idea that David Silver could accomplish even a single groupie dogged the show until its dying days, but during the Brenda years, the absurdity is even more egregious, not least because the boy’s hair resembles a discarded architectural design for the Sydney Opera House. Even without the Guggenhair, though, the kid is kind of fug. Interesting, then (if by “interesting,” you mean “depressing”), that he’s the least tonsorially offensive of the lot. Yes, the 90210 crew brought back the sideburn, but I’d like to think it would have resurged on its own, and in any case, the sideburns do not outweigh the amount of hair product abused by the show’s male leads — literally. How Priestley could hold his head up with a pony keg’s worth of Turtle Wax in his hair, I will never understand, and as time passes on the show, Brandon’s ‘do grows steadily more immobile and Reaganesque — much like Brandon himself, but Danny Drennan has covered the subject of The Shelf (and most of my other talking points) far better than I, so I’ll merely observe that I wouldn’t want to share a pillow with that dude, for many reasons, and move on to the mullet sported for the better part of two seasons by Steve Sanders. Said mullet reached its apotheosis during the Summer Of Deception, and it is so horrid and Jersey that it passes right through “ew” and winds up back at “heeeee hee hee!” Steve’s is a mullet to which all NASCAR fans should aspire. It is very short and gelled on the sides. It is longer and boofier in the back. And it is frizzy. It is so so very frizzy. It is frizztastic. It is frizzbulous. It is frizzerful. Best of all, the frizz means that the mullet does not lie down on Steve’s neck, so when Steve tilts his head forward, the whole back of the mullet tilts up in the back, recalling at once Vader’s helmet and a lion with a perm.

But the worst hair on the show belongs to Dylan, and I say that not because his coif is the unholy spawn of James Dean and an overwrought pastry chef, although it is, but because I cannot STAND Dylan. I’ve never liked Dylan — the James Dean ‘tude, the so-called alcoholic past and subsequent proselytizing, the Smurfy short-sleeved Baja top, the pretentious Beat-wad brooding, all “complemented” by Luke Perry’s pedestrian brand of minimalist thespionics, in which all emotion is represented by a series of finely calibrated head-cock angles instead of through actual emoting — and the passage of time has only solidified my impression of him as one of those self-absorbed Ginsberg-for-living asswipes who hits on you in a bar and then, when it doesn’t work, switches gears to psychoanalytic pigtail-yanking with, “You know, you seem like a really unhappy person,” and you shake your head and reflect on the fact that calling chicks “uptight” and challenging them to prove otherwise by coughing up a VIP pass to the Pink Room must have worked for someone, somewhere, or guys wouldn’t keep doing it, like, go play darts with your friends, little boy. God. I mean, I know Dylan never actually did that, but he always seemed like the type, and he’s just not hot enough to get away with it. For starters, you could screen a film on his forehead. Also, he weighs about a hundred pounds, and I just can’t get bothered about a guy with a 22-inch waist. Eat a Mega-Burger, Dylan — at least it’ll keep you from talking for a few minutes. The guy is a prat who drives a girly car and considers politeness to adults “bogus,” and why Brenda and Kelly bothered scuffling over his tiny, bony ass remains a mystery, because when he’s exhibiting what passes for a sense of humor (which is rare, because He Is The Deep One), it’s painful even by 90210 standards. In short, shut up, Dylan.

Brandon isn’t much better — he’s a reactionary jackass, and a really sucky writer for a so-called star reporter, but what strikes me most about him as I watch the old episodes is the way he walks. I never noticed it before, but the guy barges around like he’s got twelve inches in the holster. He’s got a weird head-weave-arm-paddle mack-dad combo going on at the same time — presumably to distract us from realizing that he’s about five six and couldn’t take Phyllis Diller in a slapfight — but it’s the bowlegged Just Givin’ My Boys Some Room duck-walk that fascinates me. You could drive a LeBaron between his legs in most of Brandon’s scenes and not even have to fold in the side mirrors. What the hell? Ron Jeremy doesn’t walk like that. Of course, Ron Jeremy doesn’t have to; he’s licensed for that size firearm, which is probably the issue when you get right down to it. That, and Priestley has two acting settings: swinging dick and shrinking dick. Either he’s bandy-legging around in the halls and giving out non-gay backslap-hugs to all and sundry, or he’s puckering up his entire face in a version of “anxious” that even Jim Carrey would discard as too hammy. Oh, or kissing a girl as unsexily as possible by winding his meaty hand into the back of her hair and twisting it in there REAL GOOD so she can’t get away, then mashing his face down on hers so hard that his lower lip pooches out. Couldn’t an acting coach have stepped in to correct that — or one of his unfortunate co-stars? “Cut!” “[Bap!] Watch it, The Grind With Eric Nies — I just had these capped!”

I don’t feel overly sorry for most of the unfortunate co-stars, though, since nine times out of ten the guest star/issue victim du jour shoves James Eckhouse’s Blue Bathrobe That Ate Pittsburgh out of the way for a lengthy turn at the scenery trough. The aforementioned Nikki, both too cute for the show and too old to play a sophomore, went Method during her big break-up scene with Brandon by failing to apply Chapstick for two days beforehand. It’s all about commitment to the craft, folks. Dean Cain’s acting choices included snacking on a case of bronzer and looming dorkily over Brenda in weirdly framed shots that smack of a Lifetime Network stalker pic — although, in “Reek’s” defense, he’s not only a future superhero but also seventy thousand times more smoking a hottie than Luke “Skellington” Perry on his best day, and certainly a far more convincing blandishment than a leather-vest-with-no-shirt-sporting, keyboard-on-a-guitar-strap-playing David Arquette as Nikki’s Svengali ex. Yes, you read that correctly. No, I have not slept since viewing that rerun, for I fear the visions that await me behind my eyelids. I know better than to speculate on Tom Cruise’s sexual habits, but if he didn’t have a liaison with a chinchilla and the chinchilla didn’t give birth to David Arquette, then everything I believe in is meaningless. Actually, never mind. Everything I believe in is meaningless. Why? Because a universe exists, even a fictional one, in which Emily Valentine is considered hot. I really feel for Christine Elise — she’s a pretty good actress, relatively speaking, and from the looks of things, Courtney Love puked on her head — but hot she ain’t. The sassy brunette/beret thing worked wonders a few years later, but in her original incarnation? Noooo no no. And what kind of goddamn idiot defaces a mostly-white parade float with white paint? Crazy like a fox, that one — a fox that got hit by a car. But my favorite guest star — i.e. the one who made me giggle before the dry heaves kicked in — is undoubtedly Peter Krause. Krause is kitted out in a splendiferous bear-claw hairdo reminiscent of Alex P. Keaton and a pair of pleated khaki shorts so voluminous that I sensed the presence of a hoop, and in the service of paying off an evidently steep karmic debt, he is forced to schmoop all over Ohhhhhndrea in a crowded restaurant. He does a creditable job with the material, but in the corner of his eyes glimmer tears of desolation and rage.

And yet all of these guest stars shiver in the long, cold shadow of the worst actor in 90210 history, which is to say, the worst actor in human history. Yes, “worse than Denise Richards.” I speak, naturally, of Dead Scott. Historically, opinion is divided on the issue of Douglas Emerson’s acting; one camp insists that he gave a naturalistic performance as the hee-hawing dork you can’t bear to hang out with anymore, and I will admit that he succeeds at getting “uncomfortably clueless and annoying” across, but I have to side with those who posit that 1) he merely played himself, and 2) did it badly. The fact that he never worked again, choosing instead to join the Air Force, would seem to back me up there (although I salute him for recognizing in a timely fashion that he had zero future in the dramatic arts). So would the fact that his timing, blocking, and delivery are uniformly the worst ever recorded. Emerson could have wrested Harry Hamlin’s “log with lips” crown from Hamlin easily, if he had lips, which he kind of doesn’t. Still. The entire Scanlon saga — Scott’s mother, played with “Hey! It’s That Inappropriate Lady With Alarming Wig-Like Hair!” verve by Jenny O’Hara in the finest performance of a career studded with them; Scott’s troubled beanpole sister, fashioning herself into the least appealing aspiring slut ever before flinging herself at both David (whatever) and faculty advisor Gil — is 90210 at its preachy and squeam-inducing worst. By which I guess I mean “best.”

I’ve just reached the denouement of the Summer Of Deception in the rerun cycle, and now I can look forward to Brenda’s big “I hate you both — never speak to me again!” speech. Brenda is one of the only characters I can stand after all that time; she’s a brat, but she has super hair, and I dig her bluntness. Donna’s okay too, surprisingly, although she could really use a hot oil — she’s the only genuinely pleasant character on the show during the Brenda years (with the notable exception of Nat, who absolutely must get a friend his own age right this very minute, because bleh), and the tertiary characters don’t have to praise her every second like they did later on in the show. Still, I usually go fetal on the couch about five minutes into a given episode. Dylan goes horseback-riding with an older woman who shares his insufferable philosophies on life and finding oneself…fetal. Ohhhhhndrea accuses Gil of sexism…fetal. In fact, pretty much any exposure to Ohhhhhndrea curls me up like a fiddlehead fern. The writers never gave her a decent subplot (and in context, “decent” means “even remotely entertaining”), sticking her instead with an unrequited crush on Brandon and a series of shrewish interactions with the gang, forcing her to utter preposterous lines about “going undercover on the cafeteria story” while proceeding through a rotation of rayon outfits wardrobe picked up off the floor of the group dressing room at TJ Maxx. Or, you know, stuffing her into a skimpy sequined outfit and scraping her hair into the worst possible style for her face, then shooting her from below as she walked a tightrope in a dream sequence. I have to wonder what Gabrielle Carteris did to deserve that kind of treatment; Jennie Garth had thick legs too, but they dressed around them for Garth. Carteris got HagCam, cheap grandma lipstick, and one of those matronly perms girls with square faces would always mistakenly get because they misread an article in YM. She’s not a model, it’s true, but a woman who would tell Corey Feldman to get bent on national television deserves better than Avon Rum Raisin and a crimping iron. Like, way to make the so-called feminist character a sexless frump. Jerks.

Everyone on the show is just so…jerky. Brandon is self-righteous, judgmental, overgelled, and jerky. Dylan is pretentious, rude, dull, and jerky. Brenda blinks too much, shows her parents no respect, can’t drive, and acts jerky. Steve’s relentless horn-dogging? Jerky. I used to get a kick out of all the jerkiness, but now, with everyone wearing all that royal blue and using drugs with fake names and getting ‘roid rage after taking a single pill and falling for a modeling agent’s line and talking to tabloid TV shows and prattling on about how smoking is disgusting and lock up your guns and do a breast exam every month and dyslexia isn’t your fault and chasing Color Me Badd around a hotel in coochie-cutter plaid shorts because your mom is having an affair, my girlfriend is a racist, my boyfriend is in college and wants me to sleep with him, I can’t walk in my mermaid outfit…eccchhh. And I can’t stop watching it! What is my problem? I kept a running tally of how many times I shouted, “Shut UP, Brrrrrrrrandonnnn!” at my TV during the last ep I watched — nineteen times. Nineteen times I told the so-called moral center of the show to shut up, and that’s not counting the times I told him to stow it, shut it, cram it sideways, blow it out his old wazoo, or stuff it in a sock, which would probably bring the total closer to fifty — and that total is a molehill compared to the Kilimanjaro of times I told Dylan to shut up, stand up straight, wash his hair, take off that silly tank top, buy jeans that fit, eat a hoagie, get bent, stick his father issues into a giant fan, knock off the Scottie imitation, learn to kiss a girl without flapping his mouth around like he’s trying to smell his own upper lip, get a real car, trim his sideburns using a garbage disposal, and drown. I seriously hate that dude a lot. BUT I CAN’T STOP WATCHING THE FREAKIN’ SHOW. And the worst part is that I started TiVo-ing it too late in the cycle to catch the one with Maxwell Caulfield!

Oh my God. Please Dead Scott me.

March 3, 2003

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