BH90210leans in. Hard.
People who didn't grow up in the '90s don't necessarily recall the pop culture explosion around Beverly Hills,порнография пердос 90210. The Fox TV hit embraced trash with its whole heart, delivering a frequently steamy and always unhinged 10 seasons about a group of friends growing up together in the fanciest of Los Angeles neighborhoods.
The new series goes meta, but in the absolute weirdest way. The entire core cast returns, playing grown up versions of themselves. So David Silver isn't here, but an older Brian Austin Green sure is. But the IRL actors aren't actually playing their realselves. Green, for example, isn't married to Megan Fox on the new show; his BH90210wife is a fictional mega-star in the music world.
It's as if all the characters on the show were how the actual actors are in real life... and now they're grown up.
The opening episode sees the whole gang reuniting for a Beverly Hills, 90210anniversary panel, and it includes Green, Tori Spelling (Donna Martin), Jason Priestly (Brandon Walsh), Jennie Garth (Kelly Taylor), Ian Ziering (Steve Sanders), and Gabrielle Carteris (Andrea Zuckerman). Luke Perry's (Dylan McKay) palpable absence is also acknowledged more than once, bringing oddly, deservedly poignant and realmoments to an otherwise unhinged concept.
Yes, Shannen Doherty (Brenda Walsh, people!) is on the show, too. She's barely present in the first episode, making only a brief appearance as a "surprise" panelist via livestream. She's sitting there in some tropical setting, bottle-feeding a baby tiger she herself rescued (so she says), and looking for all the world like the group's top diva. The grimaces and dirty looks that flash around as she does her schtick speak volumes.
Oh yes, there is drama. So much drama. Sex, too, and tawdry sex at that. No one's ever really grown up. Shallowness abounds, and while it's clear we're meant to read genuine relationships between these people, it's also just as evident that their... let's call them heightenedcharacterizations are laying the groundwork for big, loud, and thrilling confrontations.
Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable Priestly, for example, is a hot-headed indie filmmaker who's married to his publicist and currently in hot water for sucker punching his next movie's lead actor. Spelling is a reality star with a struggling show about her family -- called Tori & Nate, which is absolutely a knowing reference to Oxygen's cancelled Tori & Dean-- who's all nerves and anxiety.
The opening episode starts off by showing us where each of the former 90210stars are in their alt-present lives before getting them all back together in the lobby of a Las Vegas hotel for an awkward catch-up. Most of the cast has drifted apart, but they're all still invested in what everyone else is up to, and they all have opinions.
(The episode technically begins with an incrediblethrowback that I'm not going to spoil for anyone who hasn't seen it yet.)
The amount of petty sniping and backhanded compliments flying around in the premiere episode's opening scenes is enough to bring you right back to the heady days of '90s high school hallways and cliquey drama. Then you remember this isn't West Beverly High and those are the people who played the characters, not the characters themselves, even though they're acting like those characters?
It's a delightful mindfuck. Garth and Spelling whisper snarky comments about their former colleagues, but if you remember the show all you see is Donna and Kelly furtively judging and torching the rest of the gang. In the midst of all that, every one of them is coping with real life adult problems like divorce, infidelity, infertility, and their own mortality.
They're also reckoning with the fact that they all essentially grew up together on a TV show. As Garth says toward the end of the first episode, "I only went to fake high school." Which is totally wild when you remember every actor is alsoplaying an IRL version of their old character. A true Möbius strip of meta storylines.
SEE ALSO: The first glamorous 'Katy Keene' trailer could not be farther from 'Riverdale'BH90210isn't a reboot of Beverly Hills, 90210. Instead, it's a show about the cast of Beverly Hills, 90210getting together to reboot the series that made them famous. All their individual stars have fallen in various ways, and the show seems to be setting up a journey in which they all work through their pasts and toward some kind of personal fulfillment, in whatever form that takes.
Until then, and if the premiere is any indication, you can expect lots of pettiness, double-talk, snark, and sexual tension. It's so fitting that the opening episode zeroes in on a Beverly Hills, 90210anniversary panel. The fans in the audience eat up every moments, just as we're meant to here. BH90210is the best kind of gratuitous fanporn.
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