Catch up on all 10 seasons of Beverly Hills: 90210 on 10 All Access
In the week that saw the sad passing of Luke Perry and a reboot of the popular Beverly Hills: 90210 was announced, it’s time to catch up with the gang with a 10-season bingefest.
If you were a teen or young adult in the 1990s, chances are you were either on Team Brenda or Team Kelly. And if that introduction makes sense to you, chances are you were tuning in to watch Beverly Hills: 90210 back in the days where you had to wait a whole week for a new episode and wade through the commercials too. That was true television dedication, which in America alone peaked at 25 million viewers for a single episode.
Despite the teenage fandom, the show — about Minnesota twins, Brandon and Brenda Walsh, whose family relocate to swanky Beverly Hills — was never critically acclaimed.
It won just four Golden Globe awards and was only nominated for one Emmy, (for the guest appearance of Milton Berle) over its decade long run from October 1990 to January 2000.
The first-season ratings hovered at around 9.5 million but the finale, where Brenda loses her virginity to boyfriend Dylan, spiked audience interest. And the unorthodox decision by creator Darren Star and producer Aaron Spelling to air season two during the summer hiatus was a clever and calculated move that captured the teen market at home for the school holidays. Ratings doubled.
The postcode drama may not have turned industry heads, but it pulled attention where it mattered — its teen audience. And it made its unknown cast — Luke Perry, Jason Priestley, Shannen Doherty, Jennie Garth, Tori Spelling, Ian Ziering, Gabrielle Carteris and Brian Austin Green — into household names.
No one seemed to care that the 16-year-olds were in some cases being played by 28 and 29-year-olds (Carteris admitted to lying to producers about her age to nab the role of Andrea Zuckerman).
Its appeal was much more embedded in popular culture than critical acclaim — ask the kids why they loved it and they’ll tell you the cast was hot, their clothes super funky and their problems real … well, as real as it got in the prestigious postcode.
The storylines dealt with drug and alcohol abuse, teen pregnancy, rape, eating disorders, domestic abuse, friendship and relationship breakdowns and gambling.
By the time the ratings started to ebb towards the end of the series, we saw a few shark-jumping storylines (who can forget Kelly Taylor getting amnesia and joining a cult?).
But a 25 million-strong audience still tuned in for the last ever episode in which Donna and David get married and Kelly and Dylan reignite their relationship (go Team Kelly!).
And in the week where we learned of the sad passing of Luke Perry — forever immortalised as brooding teen heart-throb Dylan McKay — the show is likely to experience a nostalgic renaissance.
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