If I was hooked up to a Cringe-O-Meter during 90210 tonight, the make-believe device would have exploded by the half hour mark.  There were bad jokes, hokey dramatic moments, unearned character epiphanies, inexcusable dialogue and a plethora of scenes that made me want to never tune in to 90210 again.  But, we know the series has potential.  There have been good episodes.  The ingredients are there.  However, the execution, especially over the past two weeks, has been nothing short of abysmal.  It's painful to watch actors who have shown much talent in previous episodes have to wade through dialogue so poor, moments so contrived, and interactions so banal. 

90210 picks up the moment last episode left off, with the arrival of Harry Wilson and Tracy Clark's love child in the form of 25-year-old soldier Sean, at Annie's Sweet 16 party.  Sean is brought into the fold, integrated into the lives of the Wilson's and Beverly Hills.  Dixon struggles to deal with his father's real son.  Annie finds herself turning into a different person.  Naomi tries to find new friends, and ends up becoming the whipping girl for some upperclassmen.  Brenda and Kelly, meanwhile, do Brenda and Kelly things. 

Where to begin?  Let's start with the basic story stuff.  There was some potential, again, with the basic plot lines.  The love child meeting his parents for the first time at 25 years old obviously opens up a number of possibilities.  Sean, however, is a boring character (until the final scene, I guess, but I say he's still boring).  Harry reacts as one would expect, unaware of Dixon's trepidation, but reasonable nonetheless.  The Wilson adults are rationale, and likable.  It's the Sandy Cohen problem – if they ever did something scandalous, the audience would not turn against the character, they would turn against the series. 

Naomi's story tonight was rightfully pathetic, and is the one that writers got right (or, at least, one they have the potential to keep getting right).  She's on a downward spiral that could lead to self-discovery.  Annie's story was the one that woefully missed the mark.  The whole “Kansas girl gets changed by the big city” thread is one that should have been integral to the whole season, or the whole series.  It's not something to be introduced in the first half of one episode, and then solved in that same episode's final fifteen minutes by throwing on a mascot uniform.  That was way too easy. The writers could have gradually had Annie change, so gradually that even Annie wouldn't realize the subtle differences.  Turning her into a bitch for thirty minutes was jarring, but not as jarring as her sudden mascot-aided transition back into Sweet Kansas Annie. 

Dixon's arch was similarly disjointed.  He was fine, then he got pissed off, then he was fine.  It happened fast, it happened easy, and it closed up a plot thread that deserved more time and more weight.  Problems sure are solved fast in the Wilson household.  Do the writers know that 90210 isn't a 80's sitcom, where after every episode the characters are back in the exact same place they started? 

And, none of this even accounts for the woeful dialogue and brain-battering attempts at humor.  90210 is clearly trying to up the comedy quotient, but jamming crappy puns ("de-brief," really?) and embarrassing one-liners down our throats is not the way to do it.  It's a soap opera, so jokes aren't expected.  If there's any doubt about a piece of dialogue's quality, get rid of it.  The joke to laugh percentage is far more important that pure joke attempts, to put it in purely statistical terms. 

90210, you can do better.  The potential is there, the characters are interesting enough, and you have a franchise history to work off of.  Figure it out.


-Oscar Dahl, BuddyTV Senior Writer
(Image Courtesy of CW)