Revisiting the reboot. The teen drama 90210, a CW spinoff of the original ’90s series Beverly Hills, 90210, followed the lives of wealthy high school students in the affluent California zip code.
Although a September 2009 Entertainment Weekly review said the “new, trashier take [on the OG show] is working,” others felt that the soapy series never quite lived up to its predecessor.
“We were on for 10 years, they were on for five,” Ian Ziering, who starred in the original Darren Starr series, said of the 2008 remake during an August 2019 Television Critics Association event. “No one’s going to make a remake of that show, with all due respect. Often imitated but never duplicated.”
90210, which aired from 2008 to 2013, was the fourth series in the Beverly Hills, 90210 franchise, following the original series, Melrose Place (1992) and Models Inc. (1994). The show began with Harrison Wilson (Rob Estes) returning to his childhood home in Beverly Hills to care for his aging mother Tabitha (Jessica Walter), a former actress with a drinking problem. He brought along his wife Debbie (Lori Loughlin), daughter Annie (Shenae Grimes-Beech) and adopted son Dixon (Tristan Wilds).
AnnaLynne McCord played Naomi Clark, frenemy to Grimes-Beech’s character. The former costars launched a podcast together in May 2021, but they didn’t always get along while filming the show that brought them together.
Speaking to Us Weekly about why she and the Naturally, Sadie alum would never do a 90210 rewatch podcast together, McCord said, “It did occur to me, like, ‘How would I like to create trauma in Shenae’s life? Oh, let’s do a rewatch [podcast].’ … Like, ‘Remember that was the time I was ignoring you and didn’t say anything but the lines to you?”
Grimes-Beech, for her part, told Us it was hard for her to move past her time on the CW series.
“Once [90210] ended, it’s taken a long time to reposition ourselves in the public’s mind and start to disassociate from that show. … I tied my own identity so closely to that series because … it happened during the most formative years of my life,” the Picture This actress said in May 2021.
She continued: “And that took me a long time to mentally process and emotionally digest the trauma that came from parting ways with that series. I’m all about moving forward and moving up and onward and all the rest of it. And I’m finally in a place where I am so, so grateful for that chapter of my life. And I, like, hold it so near and dear to my heart that, like, you don’t want to f—k with a good thing. It took me a long time for it to be a good thing in my world.”
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