The premiere of 90210 has come and gone, and the response has been predictably mixed.  However, the CW has to be happy.  Really happy.  There was absolutely no chance that Tuesday's two-hour 90210 premiere was going to see universal praise.  None.  Not with the expectations, not with the original Beverly Hills 90210's presence hanging over its head, not with The OC and Gossip Girl having graced our television screens in recent years.  It was, simply, an impossibility that 90210 would please everyone.  A mixed response was the best result the CW and the 90210 producers could have hoped for.  In this roundabout way, 90210's debut was a rousing success, though you won't find many pundits echoing such a statement. 

Why, you might ask, was it impossible for 90210 to be a runaway critical hit?  90210's task – creating a series that both harkened back to the original series and modernized it for today's audiences – required a mixture, a duality that was inevitably going to clash with the expectations of some segments of the audience.  On the one hand, you had those who wanted a facsimile of Beverly Hills, 90210, a show which plied its trade with incredible amounts of cheesiness and since outdated un-ironic handling of “issues.”  On the other hand, you had people who simply wanted a modern high school drama, perhaps similar to what made/makes shows like The OC and Gossip Girl palatable in our current culture.  Any viewer who skewed too far on one of these extremes, in terms of expectations, were likely disappointed with what 90210 had to offer.  Again, the inevitability.  No matter what 90210 brought to the table, someone was going to be pissed.

What 90210 actually did was do their best to find a happy medium, keeping the spirit of the original, while upping the edginess ante (oral sex allusions in the first ten minutes).  90210 modernized itself, as well, in meta ways, most notably in the Andrea Zuckerman joke early in the pilot (“How old is she, like 30?”).  But, the show also featured sub-plots straight out of the original series, including the old “retaliating against a prank from a rival high school” plot, which I think was the premise of about nine Saved By the Bell episodes. 

90210, despite its flaws, felt right.  It succeeded in making the old feel new, while playing into the nostalgia of the original.  Almost every fan of the original I've talked to at least enjoyed the 90210 pilot – most loved it.  Had it gone too modern, too ironic, those old fans would have been put off.  If it had gone too old school, too cheesy and relentlessly un-self aware, today's teenagers would not have hesitated to click the TV off and go back to listening to the new Jonas Brothers album. 

90210 has found the correct tone, and they've created the right characters.  The base is there, and now comes the hard part.  It's all about execution now, something the pilot did not wholly succeed with.  If it does build upon the pilot, and stay true to the established tone, the CW might have another long-running hit on their hands.  Time will tell.  Despite what some critics might tell you, the pilot was a step in the right direction.


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