Beverly Hills, 90210 is the only thing getting Leia through her breakup. It’s hard to clock how, exactly, 90210 is comforting her, or even how she’s marathoning it in 1995 when it would have been airing one rerun a week (although the idea of her mainlining 90210 during the summer is at least spiritually correct, as the show got a ratings boost by airing new episodes in the summers of 1991 and 1992). But that nebulousness makes sense because, as her friends tirelessly point out, Leia did not actually have a breakup. She’s really just depressed after a near-miss with Jay, currently dating the hot-tub lady’s granddaughter Serena. Some birthday pot cheers her up, but only momentarily.
Kitty isn’t much happier; she’s supposed to be in her element, planning a lavish birthday gathering for her granddaughter, but she’s stressing about everything. Eventually, that includes the arrival of the Formans’ former next-door neighbor Bob (Don Stark), Donna’s dad and Leia’s other grandpa, who has since moved to Florida. Bob’s presence also annoys Red, seething that Bob got Leia a karaoke machine destined to outshine his possible presents (first, $20; then, her own cordless drill).
There’s no getting around Grandpa Bob, but Leia attempts to get over her heartbreak by being cool, inviting Jay and Serena to her birthday party with what Gwen describes as “strong, assertive” body language but which involves her jabbing a pickle at them for emphasis. They accept the invitation, and Leia laments that she sees so much of herself in Brenda Walsh, Shannen Doherty’s character from 90210 who “obsesses over the guy, but never goes for the guy.” This leads to a series of fantasy sketches, recasting the ’90s Show gang in 90210 parts (at least for the opening credits), alongside one actual 90210 cast member. These multiple installments of Point Place, 53140 (which take up a not-insubstantial 15 percent of the episode’s screen time but are very much in the spirit of That ’70s Show) convince Leia that she should try to win over Jay “Kelly style” by going after what she wants.
The only problem with this plan is that Jay doesn’t show up to the party. Instead, Leia is subjected to karaoke from Grandpa Bob and an overall sense of deflation. Red to the rescue! After comforting her with the familiar if sweet idea that she’s not the only one who doesn’t know what she’s doing at 15, and that at any age, “we’re all just making it up as we go along,” he unveils her real birthday gift: her dad’s Vista Cruiser, plus driving lessons (because she’s still a year from proper driver’s-license age). Grandpa Bob is properly vanquished, even as Kitty extends him the familial glad hand, and Red again curses his son’s name for bringing Bob further into his life by marriage.
But Leia’s last-minute birthday upswing isn’t done yet! Later, Jay climbs through Leia’s bedroom window and apologizes for not coming to her party, which is apparently romantic enough for her to go Full Kelly and kiss him for the first time. After he promises to break things off with Serena, they take the Vista Cruiser for a drive and are promptly pulled over by the cops, interrupting their Collective Soul–scored reverie. It’s yet another sign of the streaming-TV times that this is treated more like a cliffhanger than an episode-ending button.
So, with that in mind, is this episode especially well-structured? No. Is the show still bogged down in will-they-won’t-they crap about two teenagers who obviously will? Absolutely. Am I willing to let some of that stuff slide because the 90210 dress-up is fun, and Callie Haverda is getting pretty great at gawkily attempting to fake confidence? For now, yes.
Hangin’ Out
• Stuff that got possibly juiced studio-audience cheers in this episode: the re-introduction of Bob; the re-introduction of the Vista Cruiser; Kitty Forman saying her own name; plus a ’90s-standard woooo! for Leia and Jay’s first kiss.
• This episode also features the mildest of sorta-subplots about Nikki suspecting that Nate doesn’t know as much about her as he should, resolved when he recalls how Boyz II Men’s “I’ll Make Love to You” was playing on the radio the first time she let him touch her butt. (Not really that much of a thing about her, specifically, but fine.)
• The circle-cam sequence featuring Leia’s “birthday present” is not the strongest cascade of jokes; the show hasn’t really topped the Upstairs People version from the pilot.
• Eric is missing Leia’s birthday because he went to space camp without her and injured himself falling out of his bunk bed. Donna, meanwhile … just didn’t make the two-hours-and-change drive?
• Leia is turning 15 in this episode. Like Eric’s given age of 38, this is a compromise number: Leia and her friends clearly read a little older because some of them drive, and they don’t seem to have much trouble obtaining pot, but knowing that she can’t have been born earlier than 1980, this is about as old as she can be without suggesting she was already gestating during the run of the original show. Basically, the show is doing a lot of fudging to make it so Eric and Donna have a teenage kid at the midpoint of the 1990s. But why not just set the damn show a little later, closer to the end of the decade, when That ’70s Show debuted? It would be a different aesthetic in 1997 or 1998, but the show isn’t exactly drowning in Sub Pop bands anyway, and that late-’90s transition from alt-rock and secondhand cyberpunk to poptimism and online ubiquity is strikingly underrepresented in premature pop-culture nostalgia.
• ’90s reference watch: This episode is all about the Beverly Hills, 90210 jokes, and I have to admit, this throws off your ’90s correspondent: I was never a big 90210 guy during its decade-spanning run. As Ozzie says while watching two girls snap each other’s bra straps: “I am the wrong audience for this.” My ’90s-airing teen shows were My So-Called Life first, The Wonder Years second, and the first couple of Dawson’s Creek seasons an extremely distant third (maybe further if you count Beavis & Butt-Head, Daria or, for that matter, That ’70s Show). I know Shannen Doherty mostly from Heathers and Mallrats (which, incidentally, is a few months from release in this show’s timeline; dearly hoping season two has Leia catching it during a vanishingly brief theatrical run and finding out whether she really does want a slice of Kevin Smith). So let me know: Were the multiple iterations of the show’s 90210 parody spot-on, or mostly just fun costumes?
