9021 Ho!

I’m going to part with a nasty, embarrassing secret. I could actually get my man card revoked for sharing this information, but I figure I have enough testosterone banked up to offset even an offense this egregious.

So, here it is, the dirty, rotten little secret. I used to watch 90210 back in the day. Yeah. I know.

But it’s true and I cannot deny it. And as long as I’m taking skeleton’s from the closet I might as well let you know that I watched Dawson’s Creek to, but that was all for Katie Holmes before the aliens got a hold of her and turned her into an anorexic zombie (seriously, would someone feed that girl? Ethiopians are holding telethons to get her some food!).

Anywhore, back on point, I was admitting that I had once been a faithful and weekly watcher of the show 90210 and can recount story lines, characters and answer 90210 trivia with the best of them. Sure, it was mindless trash, but it was trash that I got hooked on. I blame my stupid freaking sister—it’s all her fault!

After a couple of weeks, she told me that I just HAD to watch this program. I must have lost a bet or something, but somehow she got me to watch an episode and spent commercials relating events from the past episodes to help make the current episode make more sense—it’s funny how vividly I remember that day, though it was something of an aberration for us to have been getting along so well, so perhaps that’s why I do.

Anyway, I watched it from about 3 episodes in through the entire run of the show. It’s safe to say that I was a fan. God help me, I was a 90210 fan. I was possibly the only straight man in the world who couldn’t miss an episode.

I mention all of this and make these embarrassing admissions because there’s a new version of 90210 that hit the airwaves for this fall and I found myself unable to avoid it. I watched it. I watched the entire 2 hour long pilot episode. God help me, I’m the only straight male in the world who watched the damn premier of the new 90210!

The new generation closely follows the original story of the first. A family moves from some Podunk town in the Midwest to Beverly Hills and BAM! Culture shock! Trouble fitting in! Temptations! The difficulties of being middle class in the midst of the richest, most spoiled kids in the entire world!

This reincarnation of the old formula actually involves a black guy too! Don’t worry though, he’s not living in 90210 with a black family—in order to add cultural diversity to the show and still retain a sense of racist realism, the black guy is the adoptive son of the white family from Podunk, Kansas.

However, after going through all of that trouble in the name of realism, they screw it up by not having a single one of the female cast members sporting outrageously large fake boobs! Seriously, I though this was supposed to be Beverly Hills? Don’t the fake boob trees grow in harmony right along side the money trees in these kids yards?

I’m sorry, I don’t care how petty, snotty, stuck up and spoiled these girls act, without the fake boobs to go with their Gucci and Prada, it all seems like a sham to me. And don’t even get me started on the fact that in the two hour long season premier, not a single dog was seen in a purse!

The girls are all very doable until they open their mouths to speak—with the exception of the girl from Kansas who is doable even after she speaks. My problem with the girls—and the guys for that matter is that they actually seem to be semi-age appropriate. On the original 90210, teenage kids were played by actors in their mid-30’s so there was no guilt associated with picturing them naked.

On this new version of the show though, the actors seem to be much more age appropriate which to an old time 90210 fan is more than just a little disturbing. I’m used to the “kids” only being about 5 years younger than the “adults” and this idea that kids should play kids is just a little spooky to me.

There were some pleasantly surprising revivals of those old characters too! Kelly Taylor, the hottest of the old generation 90210 is back as the school guidance counselor and sister to a student there. Brenda, who left the original show to battle her bout with constant and unrelenting all month-long PMS was even there as was Nat, the owner of the Peach Pit.

It was nice of them to throw a couple bones to those of us who were fans (ouch, I cringe every time I write that) of the original show. Though once again, on one hand they coddle us and then on the other, they throw us to the dogs. I’m speaking, of course, of the complete and total lack of superfluous sideburns on the guys.

Sideburns are to 90210 what the mustache is to Magnum P.I., without them, all is for naught. Don’t bother. It’s not worth it. The burns from the original 90210 have been a lasting image of cool to me and countless other guys okay, just me, ever since Brandon and Dylan first graced the small screen low those many years ago. So firmly entrenched are those enigmatic sideburns of 90210 past that is only through the pleading and begging of the girls who currently cut my hair that I ever allow them to chopped off.

But this new version of 90210 is sideburn-free. They seem intent on following the trends of fashion instead of forging ahead with their own. It’s sad, because if 90210 is going to become popular again, the least they can do is make sideburns popular again too!

No comically enormous fake boobs, no sideburns, no 36 year old men playing teenagers, no dogs in purses—you call this 90210? I’m sorry, but I think not. A hip new show? Perhaps. A network companion for the already popular show Gossip Girl (which I am happy to say I know NOTHING about), maybe. But 90210? No, I’m sorry. It just didn’t live up. And that’s all I have to say about that.

Now please excuse me while I go do something manly to remind myself that I haven’t gone too soft. Anyone feel like going to Hooters?