90210 Is Back! Is There No End To The Deja Vu Of This Season?

Written on September 3, 2008 by Marc Eastman in Television

The new fall season is underway, and it’s a very strange experience for me. I’m not sure how it happened, but I’ve suddenly been transported back to the new fall season just after I graduated high school… with a peppering of shows giving me shivers as even earlier visions drift down like ghosts of seasons past.

The cast of Roseanne is on again. I suppose I’ll have to listen as the theme from Knight Rider spins its way back into the cultural vernacular. Game shows are popular, I have to watch Julia Louise-Dreyfus, and topping it all off – 90210 is on again.

If that isn’t bad enough on its own, the thing has to unnerve me more by having Jesse’s wife from Full House, and the least interesting guy from Melrose Place in the lineup.

So, the big question is, can 90210, as a theory, still work? Sure, you might wonder why I care, but it’s actually a pretty interesting question given where the show lands today. Who is the market for this show, and can the show get through to that market?

I find the question interesting, because now we have 90210 coming at us post-OC, and post-Gossip Girl. That’s an angle directly related to one potential market, original 90210 fans. The OC was really just a show hoping to get original 90210 show fans (and those of an age who would have been the target market of the original, but only just moved into the right age demographic). The OC was basically a show mocking 90210, and, to be frank, its viewers. It was a show that was a bit more literate, a bit more into wry as a style, and it was a show that was a fan of The Gilmore Girls. It let original 90210 fans say to themselves, “See, I am more adult now, and so I like this.” It also let the younger target say to itself, “See, we younger people are more adult than when 90210 was on, and so we like this.”

And, Gossip Girl really is just 90210-redux anyway, with rich brats, and their meaningless tilting at the lower class students who got in on scholarship… or whatever. It’s 90210 with texting.

So, where does official 90210-redux fit into the mix that is the pop culture of today? It’s really hard to say, especially since Nielsen put it behind America’s Got Talent, and Wipeout (and two legitimate shows). It’s also hard to say given the show. The plot is basically the same, with some new students moving in from Kansas. Of course, it isn’t quite enough for rich, snooty Kelly to drive Brenda off in her Cabriolet today, the rich hunk has to fly the Kansas girl to San Francisco in his private jet. Whatever.

Are those in the youngish demographic going to connect with these characters the way they did in the case of the original. Anything is possible, but it’s hard to imagine. I remember watching the original and not being able to get past how old Andrea looked, and then it turned out she was pretty old. The youngest age I could find thus far for anyone playing a high school student on this edition is 19 (it’s apparently “Mostly-Twenty-Something High ), and they all seem to act more like new characters on Sex & the City than high school students.

We’ll see if this one can hold its head above water for a couple weeks, but in the new age where shows can get cancelled in a month if it looks like things aren’t working out, it might be tough for this bizarre conglomeration to figure out who it’s trying to capture. Worse, I hear there are people itching for a mid-season replacement with a new show already in the can featuring more Big Red Balls.

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