30 Years After 90210 Premiered, It’s Finally Time to Apologize to Brenda Walsh–and Shannen Doherty
Can you imagine if how you were at 19 continued to define you?
Photos Courtesy of Fox
Do you have someone you were mean to in high school?
For me it’s this girl named Jenny. We were at a party and kids were being mean (as kids are wont to do) and instead of defending her or trying to deescalate the situation, I took the path of least resistance and piled on. To this day, I still feel awful about it. I apologized to her at our ten year high school reunion and she was more gracious than I deserved. But all these years later I still feel terrible about my behavior.
Professionally, that’s how I feel about Shannen Doherty and her most famous, iconic character Brenda Walsh. I started watching the original Beverly Hills 90210 as a fan and began my nascent career as a TV critic towards to end of the show’s run. When the show aired its series finale, I wrote a retrospective which included a paragraph about how many different tragedies Kelly Taylor had been put through as a character: she joined a cult, was shot at, had an alcoholic mother, survived a fire and (I wrote) … she had to work with Shannen Doherty.
It was a cheap joke. My editor loved it. Everyone thought it was hilarious. But why did I think it was okay to make such a nasty joke about an actress who had been off the show for six years by the time of the series finale?
Let’s back up. By now with TikTok, Instagram and whatever the next thing will be, we are familiar with stars, social media influencers and the like being under the glare of the media spotlight. These days, in many ways, celebrities can choose how much they want to share with the world and how much attention they want to invite. Yes paparazzi are still everywhere but it seems like most celebrities have more control over their own narrative.
IMDb tells me that Doherty was just 19 years old when 90210 premiered. No one could have possibly fathomed what a massive hit the show would become. It’s the kind of hit we will never have again. Today there are so many networks and streaming platforms that no singular TV series will ever capture that amount of pop cultural attention. There were mall stampedes. (I would not have been able to handle a mall stampede. Would you?) There were dolls. Reports of Doherty’s so-called bad behavior were soon everywhere. Can you imagine if how you were at 19 continued to define you?
Somewhere along the way Doherty and Brenda Walsh became intertwined. Years after the show ended, many of her co-stars have written about Doherty’s “bad behavior” in their own memoirs. From being demanding of publicists to showing up late to set to her partying ways to her quick marriages and even quicker divorces, Doherty made headlines. Honestly, I don’t think anything she did then would even catch our attention now. But remember the “I Hate Brenda” newsletter? Before the Internet, over 7,000 copies of the newsletter were mailed out to subscribers. There was an entire album called “Hating Brenda.” People even complained about her bangs and her eyebrows.