Implausibly, ‘Saved by the Bell’ is one of year’s best shows
I was, frankly, too old to pay much attention to “Saved by the Bell,” a multicamera teen sitcom that ran Saturday mornings on NBC from 1989 to 1993.
The show spawned the prime-time sequels “Saved by the Bell: The College Years” and “Saved By the Bell: The New Class” (along with two TV movies and various stunt reunions), and it was the primordial soup from which crawled “Hannah Montana,” “That’s So Raven,” “icarly” and other similar creations.
But “Saved by the Bell” obviously exerted the same magnetic pull on its target audience that “The Brady Bunch” did for an earlier generation, settling in deep within its collective cerebral cortex. And as that series begat the bigscreen deconstruction that was “The Brady Bunch Movie,” so has “Saved by the Bell” come back to life again — but in a postmodernist, self-aware form — as a series from Peacock that premiered last week.
“When I was a kid,” recalled the nowgrown Zack Morris (Mark-paul Gosselaar), “I did a PSA with the president of NBC that solved drugs.”
And indeed he did. Unlike Netflix’s “Full House” sequel, “Fuller House,” which continued in the spirit of the original, “Saved by the Bell” is both a revival and a reboot, aimed at the now-grown kids who watched it back when. (Though, generally speaking, it is still safe for children — the language is mild, no one is having sex and the only drug joke is about caffeine pills.)
The happy upshot of this is that, although there are plenty of references
laid on for the fans, you needn’t have watched the old shows to understand or enjoy the new one.
At once ironic and sincere, mocking and affectionate (as one might be, looking back on one’s own youth), it starts out well and just gets better. We are back at Bayside High, where original characters A.C. Slater (Mario Lopez), the affable athlete, and Jessie Spano (Elizabeth Berkley), smart and political, are now on staff, as the school coach and guidance counselor, respec
tively.
Old classmate Zack, a hormonal prankster, accidentally has become the governor of California “as part of a scheme to get out of a $75 parking ticket.” Voted “second hottest governor in America after Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer,” he still is married to erstwhile head cheerleader, the former Kelly Kapowski (Tiffani Thiessen).
Their son, Mac (Mitchell Hoog), carrying on his father’s hair and pranks, now attends Bayside — as does Jessie’s son, Jamie (Belmont Cameli), a dim but sensitive jock who partially occupies the old Slater role and whose pep talk to the football team he captains goes, “Winning does not matter; what matters is having fun, spending time together, getting some exercise. And let’s not forget that the players on that other team have inner lives that are just as rich and complicated as our own.”
As governor, Zack has cut $10 billion from the budget, closing schools as a consequence. Shamed at a news conference, he promises to send kids from the closed, poor schools to posher schools, including his alma mater. And so students from inner city Douglas High, where the library was “a Bible and bunch of Army pamphlets” and the guidance counselor a Magic 8 Ball, are bused to Bayside.
From Douglas High, there is Daisy (Haskiri Velazquez), who is serious, motivated and an echo of Jessie, who tells her her, “I was you in high school — ambitious, stressed, I hadn’t figured my hair out yet”; Aisha (Alycia Pascual-pena), competitive as well, but at sports (she also is partially Slater); and Devante (Dexter Darden), who is taciturn and mysterious and has no counterpart in the earlier series. (Darden plays his character almost completely straight; you could strip out everything else and fill in a drama around him.)
At Bayside, they will be thrown together with Mac and Jamie and Lexi (Josie Totah), the campus queen and part-time mean girl. Totah is a transgender woman — as J.J. Totah, she played a lot of male parts — as is Lexi.
The subject is otherwise left alone, except to make some points about fear and acceptance when the story needs them. Well before the season’s end, they will have become a gang.
Lark Voorhies, as Lisa Turtle, the original show’s one regular Black character as well as its designated rich girl, will make a cameo appearance — “I’ve got to go, my lovers are waking up” is one of her lines. Screech, the old series’ not-hot nerd, played by Dustin Diamond, is mentioned but absent.
To some extent, the series is a clash of realities. The Douglas High kids, Black and brown, are traveling not only to somewhere white and wealthy but also from someplace more or less real to somewhere quite improbable. The plots recall the original — the school play, a student body election, a big dance, a party out of bounds — but with absurdist (rather than merely absurd) twists.
There are schemes and pranks, romantic alignments, misalignments and realignments. There are messages, of a sort, and they are essentially those of the original: Be true to yourself, be true to your friends, be true to your school, be good and if you can’t be good be careful and, the new series would add, if you can’t be careful be rich.
“Having money can make you act like a jerk,” Mac tells Daisy, “but fortunately you can just use more money to clean up the mess you made. It’s the circle of wealth .... You look conflicted. Let me give you some money.”
The returning cast fits the new mood ably. The younger players are first-rate. But they play different levels with great skill, resolving the character and the joke about the character in people you can authentically care about, at least a little.