5/18/00 11:35 a.m.
90210: A Generation Duped
The end of a TV show, and innocence.

By Naomi Schaefer, assistant editor at Commentary

esterday David married Donna and a large blip on the monitor of pop culture disappeared. After ten years of teen soap opera, the final episode of Beverly Hills 90210 aired last night. While a number of young columnists have used this as an occasion to reflect upon their own coming of age — one Washington Post writer even felt the need to make a spiritual pilgrimage out to the infamous zip code — the show is not important so much for what it tells us about Generation X as for what it reveals about their parents.

Ten years ago when 90210 first appeared, it was hardly the raciest thing on television. An unsupervised nine-year-old could have turned on any number of daytime or evening dramas (General Hospital or Dallas, for example) and found half-naked women hopping from bed to bed making brief pit stops for pained gulps of Scotch, a few sniffs of cocaine, and calls to their unsuspecting husbands, but very few parents ever purposefully sat their kids down in front of such shows — and certainly the producers of these shows never intended an audience of kids. While many sitcoms like the Cosby show were watched by both kids and parents, TV dramas were almost strictly adult enterprises. Beverly Hills 90210 changed all that; Aaron Spelling produced a TV drama all about high-school kids. So parents who ostensibly cared about what their children were watching, figured that since the show was about kids and the problems kids supposedly encounter in school, they were hardly exposing their kids to anything they wouldn't see otherwise. (The justification should sound familiar — it's the same one used for explicit sex education.) In fact, to listen to interviews with cast members over the years--and particularly during last week's final reminiscences special--the show sounds more like a public-service announcement than a multi-billion dollar television show. The actors want to "teach" children how to deal with the "issues" they may not understand. Perhaps in the course of a lifetime, a person might be raped, fight a drug problem, face a criminal at gunpoint, drive drunk, have an abortion, wreck a car, watch parents divorce, contract a sexually transmitted disease, become a single parent, come out of the closet, attempt suicide, and battle an eating disorder, or watch friends go through the same. But does that mean kids have to see them all in lurid detail by the age of seventeen?

In fact, the age of 90210 watchers when the show started was much younger than that. In the same way that twelve-year-olds constitute a significant percentage of Seventeen's readership because they want to emulate the older girls pictured and described there, so people who like dramas about high school are often barely finishing elementary school.

As a camp counselor, I remember asking Megan, an eight-year-old in my charge, why she was so tired one morning. "My parents let me stay up past my bedtime last night to watch 90210. It was my favorite episode--the one where Brenda and Dylan have sex." I knew her mother. I liked her mother. Her mother wasn't a bad person. But, like the parents of Megan's fellow campers, she had fallen for Spelling's "public-service" line. Megan's mother thought she was doing her child a favor by warning her of the dangers she might encounter as an adolescent.

The real danger, of course, is that kids who would otherwise be able to put off these problems or maybe avoid them altogether would now think it was normal and even acceptable to experiment with sex, drugs, and alcohol. The show taken as a whole over the last ten years sends an even more dangerous message.

Despite the often horrific mistakes of their high school and college years, the gang from 90210 grows very easily into well-adjusted twenty-somethinghood. Dylan kicks his drug habit, Donna marries her first love, Steve stays around to father his child, Noah gives up sailing in favor of "commitment," and Andrea finds single motherhood very fulfilling. The lesson, of course, is that teenage years are intended for experimentation and there are no bad long-term consequences to screwing them up.

Spelling has duped an entire generation of parents into feeding their kids these messages by claiming that his show somehow represents reality for today's children. And Spelling's success has spawned innumerable look-alike teen dramas, each one pushing the envelope a little more. (The first episode of Dawson's Creek, which included an explicit discussion of masturbation, makes 90210 look pretty tame in comparison.)

Spelling's protests notwithstanding, even the characters on Beverly Hills 90210 seem to understand that their lives are far removed from the realm of normal teen experience. In the final episode, Kelly asks Steve whether he sometimes feels as if "their lives are like a Stephen King novel," where they are "always afraid to turn the page" because "something terrible might happen to another one of their friends." .