teen metadrama

The entire series is on YT (I didn’t check for every episode, but it looks comprehensive at a glance) and the episodes are short, so if you wanna watch it’s here.

And for good measure, here's part one of the pilot!

Love that thumbnail.

Now, I have long said/thought that if you consider yourself a connoisseur of teen melodrama, you absolutely have to have watched Beverly Hills 90210. It is the OG. It is Gaia Mother Earth; every other teen melodrama has sprung from it.

Before we dive into Grosse Pointe and all its wonders, I'm gonna detour because this is something I've always thought but never really had a place to dive into, which is that Gossip Girl is the closest spiritual descendent of Beverly Hills 90210, to the point of very nearly being a straight-up ripoff. It's mildly interesting that GG followed more in the footsteps of 90210 as opposed to more well-meaning, earnest shows like Dawson's Creek or My So-Called Life, both because the latter shows are definitely what people were expecting from it, and also because 90210 was dated/a joke nearly as soon as it came into being. GG was IMO extremely dated in terms of not just gender but also storytelling. It didn't take notes from shows that evolved or improved on the genre; it went right to the flawed source.

Let's just make a little list of comparisons, hm? We have the New Kids In Town, the less wealthy (i.e. upper middle class to everyone else’s millionaires) audience surrogates in the form of siblings Brandon and Brenda/Dan and Jenny. The brother is the sanctimonious, resistant one who nevertheless finds himself fitting right in (though if you think Dan is judgy, you've never seen Brandon Walsh in action; Dan's got nothing on him) and the sister is way more desperate to be part of the in crowd. She moves from sweet ingenue to more of a troublemaker, and the actress apparently becomes so much trouble she's written out after four seasons. There's the female best friend in love with the brother who is also poor and who is roundly despised by fans (looking at you, Andrea/Vanessa) even though she's less of an asshole than the rich kids (mostly) and actually has a moral code and stuff. Also written out, though thankfully Vanessa didn't have to suffer through Andrea's pregnancy and marriage nonsense. Vanessa also wasn't secretly forty-five years old.

Chuck and Dylan are basically the exact same character except I have a childhood weakness for Luke Perry so I let Dylan slide on a lot of the exact same things. They're both callous bad boys raised by unloving hotel magnate fathers and abandoned at birth by their mothers (who were paid off by their fathers to leave town), grew up lonely and isolated in hotels which eventually led to being oversexualized and substance-abusing (I hate Chuck as much as if not more than the next, but like, the way he talked, he was definitely molested by one of his nannies, right?). Then their fathers died, sending them into an angst spiral, and guess what? Both of their dads ended up being secretly alive way later in the final seasons when both shows had run out of ideas. SAME CHARACTER. Well, Dylan had a motorbike. Oh shit Chuck had one too for a minute, didn’t he? Fuck.

It gets slightly trickier with the girls. Despite the blonde/brunette frenemy stuff intrinsic to both Kelly/Brenda and Serena/Blair, I'm going to say Blair is the Kelly of the show. She never really had Kelly's vaguely bad girl past/vibe or her specific kind of horrible mom (though a horrible mom nonetheless), but I think she serves the same purpose narratively, as in: she was the shallow mean girl type who was revealed to have hidden depths and vulnerabilities and ended up wresting the show from the other female stars in terms of screen time. Though I wouldn't say Kelly was ever as beloved as Blair was by the fans (at least in my house; to this day, my older sister probably wouldn't put Kelly Taylor out if she was on fire) (side note: Kelly Taylor was semi-ravaged in a fire in a subplot that ruined her burgeoning model career) (none of these ruinous fire scars were actually at all visible). Kelly also functioned as the main point in the show's driving love triangles, which moved from who's going to pick her? (Kelly-Dylan-Brenda/Blair-Nate-Serena) to who's she going to pick? (Brandon-Kelly-Dylan/Dan-Blair-Chuck). Kelly/Dylan was ultimately the OTP of the show even though they were horrible together because they had ~passion. Sound familiar?

So what about Serena? I'm tempted to say she's the Donna Martin just in terms of sweetness but that’s not right; Donna never had half the lurking darkness of Serena. (Though Donna did have a cousin who joined the show later who ended up also being her half-sister because her dad slept with her mom's sister. "It was the 70s!" was the excuse of Donna's highly religious, uptight parents.) Ultimately Kelly is probably the combined forces of Serena and Blair; she did that passive aggressive Serena thing way more than she was ever openly scheming. She also had “a past,” a mom who dated another character’s dad, and substance abuse issues of her own – never forget Kelly’s random diet pills addiction, Kelly’s coke addiction, and also David Silver’s meth addiction because that was hilarious.

Georgina is obviously Valerie. <3 Right down to hatred for Blair/Kelly and slow burning obsession with Dan/Brandon.

Nate, my darling, my prince, I am so sorry: you are Steve Sanders.

And none for David Silver, bye.

(Jenny had a little bit of a David Silver thing happening.)

But onto the real purpose of this post! Which is Grosse Pointe. (I should do an in-depth 90210 post though. Me: serving dated shit no one cares about since ’09.) I’m so sorry I don’t have any gifs for y’all, but VLC was being a little bitch and I didn’t feel like hassling myself. But it is sad because this show is so forgotten that there is very little visual representation floating around the internet for me to share with you.

The main cast of the show-within-a-show are a Shannen Doherty type (Irene Molloy playing Hunter Fallow playing Becky), a Tori Spelling type (Lindsey Sloane playing Marcy playing Kim), a Luke Perry, a sooooort of Jason Priestly/Brian Austin Green, and a soooort of Jennie Garth playing a Valerie Malone. That is super complicated. Also a lot of names. So let’s break that shit down.

Hunter/Shannen is the star of the show and also the most trouble, constantly fighting with the writers, undermining her co-stars, and being as difficult as possible. She was obviously my favorite, because I am incapable of resisting a raging bitch with hidden vulnerabilities. In Hunter’s case, it was that her mother was an alcoholic stage mom who had essentially been living off Hunter her entire life – a classic Dina Lohan case, so to speak.

There were rumors they had to rewrite the Marcy because Aaron Spelling took issue with how obviously she was Tori, but at the end of the day I don’t notice a huge difference – I think originally Marcy was supposed to have an “uncle” who worked for the network, but, as a longterm and lowkey Tori Spelling stan, she’s still basically Tori. Marcy was my second fave, because she’s a total pushover with a heart of gold who gets stepped on by everyone all the time. She is introduced in the pilot by driving to work and repeating confidence-boosting mantras to herself in a wavery little voice: “I love myself. I love myself. I only eat healthy food. I only eat healthy food.” And then she blitzes out on a Little Debbie. I was immediately in love. You just want things to work out for her SO MUCH.

Lindsey Sloane (Big Red & Sabrina’s best best friend Valerie!) is just genuinely wonderful, and she and Irene Molloy were definitely the best actors on the entire show, able to bridge the gap between campy comedy and genuine vulnerability with a skill that is honestly rare. Irene Molloy has no other acting credits besides this and another failed 90s show (she went on to be a folk musician, or something?) and it’s a real shame because she’s really talented. She honestly reminds me of Leighton Meester at times. One of the executive producers, Robin Schiff, had this really nice thing to say about her that reminded me of early seasons Blair/Leighton: “This actress, Irene Molloy, really had the ability to just go straight at being that narcissistic bitchy girl but her instinct was always to bring a little bit of vulnerability to it that made her riveting rather than just off putting.”

Though Hunter is even more off the walls than Blair ever was, lol.

Courtney, the third female lead, is your classic newbie audience surrogate (why do movies/tv love audience surrogate characters that introduce you into the world of the show? I feel like I almost always hate them). She’s a new girl cast on the show as Becky’s cousin Laura from Virginia (aka Valerie Malone) and she’s really innocent/dedicated to her acting whereas everyone else is more selfish and jaded. She tries really hard to read depth into the vapidity of the show – not unlike viewers (Courtney was also a fan of the in-show show before being cast in it). She starts to eclipse Hunter’s star power and gets increasingly ridiculous and oversexualized storylines: Laura seduces Becky’s boyfriend! Laura becomes a stripper! Laura becomes a hooker! Laura secretly has a baby back in Virginia!

The boys are, as always, less interesting. There’s a pretty funny Luke Perry type (Quentin, playing ~~Stone Anders~~~, one of the best faux bad boy names I have ever heard) who is blatantly older than everyone else and constantly lying about his age (he’s been 27 for three years straight). His darkest secret is that he’s balding and wears a hair piece. The sort of Jason Priestly/BAG is a dumb pretty boy who I had little time or patience for. Then there’s his best friend Dave the stand-in whose talent is constantly overlooked because he’s not cute, and also blah blah love subplots.

Darren Star had this to say about his intentions with the show: “The idea for this series, you know, I had been kicking it around for years, ever since creating Beverly Hills 90210 and […] I thought what was going on behind the scenes was more interesting that what we were actually writing about and we had such a young cast that I felt like they were sort of living their post-high school experiences in kind of this crucible of fame and money. And I just thought, wow that is such a great arena for comedy.”

And it really is! Personally, I love inner workings type stuff and this show is really fun though I wouldn’t say it took full advantage of what it could do. And honestly, the WB was not the right place for it. The show is a pretty sunny dark satire (difficult to pull off, and yet it manages) but I wish it could have pushed more. Star did speak in episode commentaries about how the network often thought they were going too far with things and they had to pull back.

The show is a great time capsule for that era of television (the faux actors are constantly shit-talking Dawson’s Creek and Buffy) when earnest teen dramas were at an all-time high. The bulk of the action is in wrangling/pacifying the actors, controlling the gossip between the crew, and dealing with the network. As it went on, it became more focused on the personal life of the actors, which is kind of neither here nor there. Not quuuuite as interesting to me, but the characters were well-drawn and it was easy to get invested in them, so I didn’t exactly mind it either.

One of the stated goals of the show was to explore how show business dramatizes and exaggerates a real high school experience, especially with such a young cast, so a lot of the plots are these layered examinations of body image, treatment of women, and how the lines are constantly blurring for the actors. There’s one scene where Hunter and Courtney’s characters are having a catty throw-down in the school courtyard that is also a real fight between the actresses because of behind the scenes contention. “This isn’t high school!” Courtney yells, fed up with Hunter’s backstabbing, and Hunter answers her: “Look around you!” Which I feel like sums up a kind of thesis of the show nicely. When you’re inundating your daily life with a fake, heightened high school experience, is it any wonder that it rubs off?

There are three episodes that I feel are ~notable enough to discuss to give a good feel for the show: Devil in a Blue Dress, Satisfaction, and Opposite of Sex.

Devil in a Blue Dress is about Hunter auditioning for an Oliver Stone movie about Monica Lewinsky (ah, sweet 2000), which feeds into Hunter’s constant desperate need to be the most successful/doing more and better than everyone else. (There’s a funny running bit that every time a salacious or scandalous storyline comes up for another character and they don’t want to do it, Hunter – and fake Luke Perry – always JUMP on the chance for it to be them instead, lol, but it never is.) In an effort to impress Oliver Stone, she decides to gain weight so as to better emulate Lewinsky.

This obviously brings up a lot of stuff. One of the most fun things is how free Hunter is once she has what she considers carte blanche to eat as she likes – it sets in motion a total personality shift, and she goes from raging brat with a hair-trigger temper to totally relaxed, sweet, and kind. This also allows fellow actress Marcy (who has a more than alluded to but never discussed eating disorder, possibly another reference to real Tori) to live vicariously through Hunter. But once the network takes notice of Hunter’s weight gain, they leave it to the executive producers to tell her to drop the extra weight.

It’s absolutely a sensitive topic but I thought it was handled cleverly and not really offensively within the context of the show/as a satire. One great thing is that Hunter isn’t at all insecure or unhappy with her body and when the producers approach her (“It’s not that we don’t want you to gain weight, it’s that we don’t want Becky to gain weight.”), she basically rips them a new asshole and flounces off. Darren Star said this was taken directly from his own experiences (without naming the actress, of course).

Of course, Hunter loses the job (to Reese Witherspoon. SWEET 2000!) and reverts immediately back to her old persona/weight out of anger and spite.

Satisfaction is probably the best episode of the show. It’s so much fun, and if you only ever decide to watch one, make it that. In this episode, a new executive producer comes on board, a woman who used to work on ~gritty shows like My So-Called Life and intends to bring an edge to Grosse Pointe. She immediately does a bunch of awesome shit like make the male lead be naked in every single scene he’s in, throw in some homoerotic locker room fights, and has one of the girls (Marcy, playing Kim) have her first orgasm. Marcy, being a shy and skittish type, is not at all for this (Hunter, of course, is totally down for Becky to have her first orgasm; Fake Luke Perry – Quentin – insists Becky is definitely already having them!!11!!1) and eventually it’s revealed that she’s never had one IRL either. Meanwhile Faux Jason Priestly (Johnny, playing Who Cares) is starting to get uncomfortable with the constant objectification. Isn’t it funny how men get so touchy about that?

The male exec producer starts to get touchy about it too. Isn’t it irresponsible, he says, to show teen girls having sex on TV??? To which the new lady replies that they were already having sex – the difference this time is that Kim is enjoying it. In the commentary for that episode, Darren Star explained another real life inspo, which was an issue on 90210 after Brenda first slept with Dylan. Brenda enjoyed the sex and even celebrated it afterwards – and this did not please the network, so in the next episode Brenda had to be punished with a pregnancy scare, then she and Dylan had to break up. Punished is actually the word Star used too! It’s interesting to be aware of these things in television but then to also have them totally confirmed. And, like, what kind of ass backwards nonsense! It’s like those old Hollywood movie rules, where characters were allowed to drink onscreen as long as they didn’t look like they were having fun.

Meddling by the male producer and a million arguments/freakouts on set cause the awesome lady producer to be fired – another thing I’m sure is not uncommon IRL. The homoerotic, super naked boys’ locker room fight is turned into a homoerotic, super naked girls’ locker room fight. The Very First Orgasm plot never airs, and stuff goes back to the status quo. At the very least in a cute subplot, Courtney orders a vibrator for Marcy (not creepy! there’s a whole thing about Marcy not being able to buy one herself because she’s playing such a wholesome character, and she utters the truly gr8 line, “I’m too famous to have an orgasm!”) and Marcy finally has one, at least. But interesting! Star said they even had issues with that, that they had to walk such a fine line with Marcy being all afterglowy on her own; another character had a masturbation scene in another episode and apparently the network told them it was fine, again, if he didn’t look like he was enjoying himself. Which seems so nuts! Glorifying teen sex, sure, people get on their moral high ground about that, but surely having a wank should be acceptable????? The actors aren’t even teens! God.

The show dealt with a lot of tongue-in-cheek stuff about the commodification of female bodies within the entertainment industry and the differences with women vs men that I found veeery interesting. It did sort of give in to the apparent hilarity of the girls facing some manipulation from the boys but always seemed to end with slight progress: Quentin realizes he’s a sex addict and apologizes to all the women he’d used; Johnny learns from his own experiences/feelings of objectification to not do the same thing to his co-stars. I mean, I’d love to start with male characters already knowing shit like that, but I feel like it’s pretty cool the show actually addressed it instead of flat-out reveling in it, especially for having aired fifteen years ago.

Finally in this episode tour, Opposite of Sex. It’s not as good as the other two episodes, though it does boast a Jason Priestly-as-himself cameo (Sarah Michelle Gellar also cameos as herself in another episode! She is an actual angel! But there’s some weird homophobic stuff eep 2001). What I found most interesting about it was more network interference stuff, which as you can probably gauge from this post is of great fascination to me. Basically Marcy’s character Kim is in a coma and the WB decides to run a huge promo thing about it: call one number and Kim dies; call another and she lives. Poor Marcy goes on the message boards to see the reaction to the storyline (hahaha the internet of fifteen years ago) and every single post is KILL KIM. This is interesting to me because I feel like there is always that one female character on a show who is just so totally hated for such tenuous reasons, and it’s great that Grosse Pointe tapped right into that. It really did a good job of building that interconnected web of writerly intent / network hovering / actor expectations / audience reactions.

So, Kim dies. BUT it is also the highest rated episode of the series ever (though they didn’t beat Sabrina, another running joke) and because it does so well and makes Kim so suddenly popular (hmmm sounds famiiiiiliiiiiar), the network makes them bring her back. As her own long lost twin sister in a blonde wig, of course.

I’ve always been pretty fascinated with shows and movies that deal with fame (I’m a huge sucker for biopics and musician movies, lol), but especially lately. 30 Rock is a great funny example, and I’ve also been singing the eternal praises of Bojack Horseman to anyone who will sit still long enough (who would EVER GUESS that a show about a cartoon motherfucking horse would be so fucking real and poignant??????). But this specific cross-section of behinds the scenes AND teen melodrama is my jam in just about every way.

And you know, as much as I would ADORE a show like this now that did an even deeper, more cohesive, no punches pulled job of telling this kind of story, I’m not sure how much relevance it would have? The market isn’t saturated with this type of teen show in the way that it used to be – the WB is over, the CW is riding that comic book train. This kind of non-magical, blasé teen shit is just not really around. Faking It probably comes the closest. Awkward, maybe? I don’t watch that. Reign is a “””””period piece””””, Scream Queens is total garbáge and also horror. I mean…what else is there?

At the time Grosse Pointe came into being, there was Dawson and Buffy (supernatural, but still) and My So-Called Life. 90210 was ending its ten year reign of terror. There were about a million tried-and-failed spinoffs trying to capture the zeitgeist. And teen movies were also at an all time incredible high, with basically all of our generation’s classics being churned out one after another. There aren’t even really the same kind of teen movies anymore. I suppose there’s been an uptick since the John Greene nonsense began, but the last teen movie I saw that felt fresh while also tapping into the spirit of the old stuff was Easy A, and that was a while ago.

It’s sad to me because it’s what I grew up with and what I’ll always love purely for that reason if nothing else.

In closing, have this beautiful gif of heroin-addicted Dylan ballerina flopping Donna into a pool.

[ x ]

Also I may do a post about the Lifetime 90210 movie when it happens. Thoughts? Yay? Nay?