by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last Saturday night, on my own, I watched a considerably
less exalted show, a movie on Lifetime called The Unauthorized Beverly
Hills, 90210 Story. I hadn’t planned on watching this because I never
watched Beverly Hills, 90210 when it was new and my previous excursion in watching this sort of fare
on Lifetime, The Unauthorized Full House Story, hadn’t been especially stimulating. This one proved to be a bit more
interesting, less because of anything to do with the plot — though Shannen
Doherty’s (Samantha Munro) meltdown (she was fired at the end of season four
for diva-ish behavior, including
coming in chronically late or not at all) was effective and well dramatized —
than seeing a bunch of cute guys engaging in games of catch and other horse
play while not wearing shirts (they were smooth-chested and you could really
see their nipples — ah, the benefits of a big-screen TV!). The director was a
woman, Vanessa Parise (this on the day the Los Angeles Times published an article on the American Civil
Liberties Union filing a formal complaint with the U.S. Justice Department’s
Civil Rights Division about the scandalous under-representation of women as
film and TV directors; reportedly just 1.6 percent of feature films made in the U.S. last year were
directed by women, and the percentage of TV films and series episodes directed
by women was marginally higher but still in the low teens), and she did a good
job with Jeffrey Roda’s script (one of the things I like about Lifetime is they’re giving opportunities to
women directors, and while not all of them have risen to them, Christine
Conradt’s work on The Bride He Bought Online shows her as someone who deserves assignments for
theatrical features). Beverly Hills, 90210 was produced by Aaron Spelling, who at the beginning of the show is
lamenting that for the first time in 30 years he doesn’t have a TV series on a major network. Two
representatives for the newly organized Fox network come to him and ask him to produce
a show about teenagers in Beverly Hills. “What do I know about teenagers in
Beverly Hills?” he asks — to which the anonymous “suits” reply, “You have two
teenage daughters and you live in Beverly Hills.”
The movie cycles through the
show’s rough first year, in which Spelling jokes that only “divine
intervention” can save it from being canceled — and “divine intervention” of a
sort actually happens via the first U.S.-Iraq war, in which the established
networks tear up their normal entertainment schedules to cover the war and Fox
decides to counter-program by keeping their regular shows on the air and even
commissioning more episodes in case the war
runs into summer — whereupon Spelling and his show runner/director are told
that the kids who watch Beverly Hills, 90210 won’t want to spend their summer watching high
school kids in class; instead they’ll want to watch them on summer vacation.
They also chart the scandal surrounding the sexual experience written into the
script for two of the characters, including Doherty’s, and the way it provokes
“moral” reactions because she hasn’t seemed to suffer from the experience. And
the show attributes Doherty’s meltdown to her angst at how people who don’t even know her hate her and
have her confused with the unsympathetic character she plays on the show —
though there’s a brief bit showing her sniffling that suggests within the rules
of basic-cable TV that she’s really doing coke. The Unauthorized Beverly
Hills, 90210 Story is at least a bit more interesting than The
Unauthorized Full House Story — the people on Beverly
Hills, 90210 got to do more (including
get into more trouble), and at one point the show’s set is depicted as a sort
of straight people’s bathhouse in which everyone is “doing” everyone else.
Indeed, Lifetime followed the movie with a show whose concept was of such
appalling tastelessness it deserves to rank along with their shows about
plastic surgeons and little people: a show on which Tori Spelling (played in
the movie by Abby Ross), Beverly Hills, 90210 star as well as daughter of the show’s overall
producer, was hooked up to a lie detector and asked salacious questions like
whether she got her role on the show just because her dad was producing it and whether she lost her virginity for
real to one of her co-stars (I was hoping she’d say, “Yes, and you know who it
was? Shannen Doherty!”).
