90210 Hell No

A few Christmases ago I asked for a MacBook. My parents had me hooked on getting a new computer and I was all full of anticipation about becoming a nerd with a shiny white laptop. I counted down the days until Laptop Day and then it finally arrived. After I finished opening all of my gifts with nary a laptop to be found, my mother took out a large gift bag and handed it to me. "This is it", I thought, "the moment I've been waiting for". And when I opened the bag there was no giant white box of geeky love. There was a purple blanket. And my mother was all smiling and thrilled with her gifting and I sat there like someone just shot my cat because the anticipation that was there for so many weeks had been burst like a giant balloon. That's what watching this God awful piece of crap 90210 was like; I had been waiting for the day to arrive and when it did arrive I kind of wished I could have those two hours of my life back. Epic, triumphant, beating drums FAIL. 

Where to start with this entire thing is like attempting to find one bad bulb in all the Christmas lights. One bad one ruins the whole string. And that's how this entire two hours was, one bad thing after another. Starting with teenage fellatio in the first five minutes and ending with lord only knows what because some time around 9:45 I stopped watching and started to file my nails. I can do bad. A lot of people can easily do bad because sometimes bad is so terrible that it turns into good again. And then we're filled with laughter and awful one liners. But the new 90210 is so bad that Aaron Spelling is cringing from the great beyond at how his iconic creation has been ruined. It was painful to watch something that was cobbled together by a bunch of self-congratulatory "experts" only to realize that I could have written something better myself in the span of a half-hour. Ok so that last sentence was paraphrased from the Great Metalia who was able to come up with words to explain the severe disaster that this show was. Meanwhile, I kept asking sputtering out a repetative "Why is this so bad?" because I needed to know in order for my life to go on.

(deep breath)

The series starts off the way that it's original did; with a family moving from the midwest to Beverly Hills. The kids too new and naive in their precious midwestern, corn husking ways, to realize that kids from Beverly Hills can be some of the biggest bitches and jackasses known to mankind. Clearly there is not television in Kansas because I'm pretty sure that the catty teenage thing has been done over and over again. But who am I to judge. The marked difference between this family and that of the Walshes is that *GASP* one of the children of the Wilson family is black (Dixon, the son, played by Tristan Wilds who is going to be known as that kid who looks like Chris Brown). Like an actual black person has shown up in Beverly Hills. I have a feeling that someday soon he will teach the entire high school an important lesson in race relations. On the lacrosse field.

Dixon's sister is Annie. She's the quintessential midwest girl who wants to be friends with everyone and already has a flame in school hottie Ethan who is dating (and cheating on) the resident mean girl, Naomi. Naomi has a long time enemy named "Silver" who has a BLOG. Silver is THE Erin Silver of David Silver and Kelly Taylor fame. Speaking of the babies who are now all growed up, there is Hannah Zuckerman Vasquez, the offspring of Andrea Zuckerman and her husband Jesse Vasquez. She is there to take her mother's place as the slightly nerdy girl who does the morning news. There's also a MILF in Lori Loughlin and the cool teacher who you know is cool because of his scruffy beard. I'll also bet $150 and a new Kate Spade to anyone who says that he will NOT attempt to have sex with Naomi because if that isn't the most obvious plot line known to man then I don't know what is. There are some other people who really don't matter and who I've already forgotten. Not because of my lack of attention towards the ticking time bomb of a plot but because it doesn't matter. Think of every caricature of every person who has ever been in a high school. Now multiply that by 15. Does your head hurt yet?

Now rinse and repeat every single high school plot line that has been washed and rewashed so much that it's now utterly faded and just a bunch of string glued together. That's what this was like. A travesty to all that was holy and all that we missed from the original. Which begs the question of why. By 8:30 PM I wrote a note that said "This is awful, so very, very awful". By 8:51 PM, I genuinely wanted to know "Why, God, why?" I could keep talking in circles about just how much I wanted to toss my flat screen off my third floor balcony but I think you get my point. And if any of you can adequately answer my question of why in God's name someone would do such injustice to a perfectly good television show, then you have my sincerest thanks. Run, don't walk, and save yourself and that hour of your life you could be using to get a tetanus shot. Because that would be oh so much better and more useful than foaming at the mouth while watching something so hideous that if it were a movie, it would make Gigli Oscar-worthy.