‘Beverly Hills, 90210’ creator says network got ‘bent out of shape’ after Dylan and Brenda had sex
Smells like teen spirit.
Darren Star, who created “Beverly Hills, 90210” before he moved on to “Sex and the City” and “Emily in Paris,” recalled how the network wasn’t happy after Shannen Doherty’s character, Brenda Walsh, and Luke Perry’s character, Dylan McKay, had sex.
“They had a lot of notes. Everything about sexuality was hard to deal with,” he told Vulture in a recent interview.
“Initially, they were like, ‘Where are the parents? Where are the teachers?’ And I’m like, it’s not a show about parents and teachers. It’s a show about these friends who were there for each other, solving each other’s problems.”
The teen drama ran for 10 seasons on Fox from 1990 to 2000, launching the careers of Doherty, Perry, Tori Spelling, Jennie Garth, Jason Priestley and Brian Austin Green.
Toward the end of Season 1, Star wrote and directed an episode in which Brenda and Dylan have sex after prom. After it aired, there was backlash.
“When all these affiliates realized what they’d aired, a lot of them got bent out of shape,” Star said.
He explained, “And it wasn’t just the fact that Brenda had sex but that she enjoyed it. When we came back for the next season, they demanded there was an episode where she had remorse.”
Star said he wasn’t happy about it. “I was like, ‘I can’t believe I have to write this.’ She had a pregnancy scare. She realized she was too young to have sex.”
In real life, both Doherty and Perry have passed away. Perry died in March 2019 at the age of 52 after suffering a stroke, and Doherty died last month at age 53 of cancer.
Perry’s daughter, Sophie, 24, shared an Instagram tribute to her late dad’s on-screen love interest after Doherty’s death.
Doherty also reminisced about Perry at a “Beverly Hills, 90210” panel at MegaCon Orlando this past February.
“It was shocking,” she said about his death. “I have a very visceral reaction whenever someone brings up Luke because as someone with cancer — and a really horrible cancer at Stage 4 — I thought I would be the first to go. So when it was Luke, it really just sent me for a tailspin.”
Doherty admitted that “there were moments” when she and Luke “were not so close” when they worked together on “Beverly Hills, 90210.”
“But later we became extremely close,” she added. “So to lose him as our relationship was just sort of flourishing as friends, and our respect and admiration for each other was coming to its fullest potential … it was just very hard.”
Although teen TV shows are a dime a dozen today, when “Beverly Hills, 90210” premiered, it “was the biggest long shot ever,” Star said, adding, “No one had written a show about teenagers from a teenage point of view.”
So, when it first premiered, he recalled being “always on the verge of cancellation.”
“I remember [producer Aaron Spelling] talking to the network, saying, ‘Just give us three more episodes.’ He was a fighter for the show,” he said.
“It limped along until the reruns started to do better. Then it came back in the summer and caught fire.”
