90210, Back Again

As my colleague Ruth Samuelson mentioned on this blog this morning, Beverly Hills, 90210 is back in a new version called 90210. This is, she rightly points out, exciting news. I made a point of watching last night’s premiere, partly because I do love bad TV so. But I also tuned in because 90210 was, back in the day, a subject very dear to my heart: For a couple of years I wrote a column for my student newspaper called “90210 Watch” that had regular updates on the goings-on in each episode. We had no fancy metrics to show how many people were reading, but it was a smashing success for me personally. The Chicago Tribune rang me up for a quote in a story about campus viewing habits. My arrival at somebody’s apartment to watch an episode was moderately event-like. Women at bars, cognizant of my byline, suddenly voiced interest in things I said.

This would be a good place to mention that the University of Chicago once came in dead last in a survey of America’s best party schools.

For me, journalistically speaking, it’s all been downhill from there: Hell, I’m not even the most famous “90210 Watch” contributor living in the D.C. area. But 90210 has gone downhill too: It’s more than a little disheartening to see Tristan Wilds go from Mini Omar to Beverly High Token Black in the course of a few short months. Everybody’s still petty, moralizing, and dumb as rocks—yet dumber somehow, now. Blogs and text messages are trusted as gospel, which leads not just to bad plot turns, but bad dialogue:

“You’ve got to stop with that blog. All it does is cause problems.”

“That’s what a blog is supposed to do. Cause problems.”

Small wonder it didn’t screen for critics.