Teen pinups who free themselves of their TV origins can be counted on one hand with fingers to spare: Ron Howard. Michael J Fox. Zac Efron.
Luke Perry never quite made it to those ranks, but that’s no discredit to him. Despite working pretty regularly until the day he died – which is more than a lot of teen stars can say – he always knew his obituaries would read ‘Dylan McKay has died,’ referring to the bad(ish) boy he played in the original series of Beverly Hills, 90210 from 1990-1995, and then again in 1998-2000 when he gamely, if through somewhat gritted teeth, revived the character. And so it has proved to be the case.
That Perry could never escape the shadow of 90210 – as all its fans called it – was not a failing on his part. None of the original cast could, and it’s a testament to how seminal, for a whole generation, that TV show was. In the age of streaming, when teenagers can watch pretty much any TV show they like, from any country in the world, whenever they fancy, it’s hard to convey just how exciting 90210 felt at the time. Back then we all watched the same thing, and what we watched was 90210. It was unlike anything else teens of that era had seen, all these fancy cars and mega mansions, this exotic gift from the empire of Aaron Spelling. Try to imagine what it was like seeing this on British screens after years of having only grim British school dramas, and those Australian soaps with their cardboard sets and plots about backwoods wine bars. As those distinctive opening credits rolled, showing impossibly beautiful teenagers in impossibly beautiful LA, it was like our TV dreams went from black and white to colour. Toto, I don’t think we’re in Grange Hill any more.
Spelling had captured the aesthetic of the 1970s with Charlie’s Angels and The Love Boat, then repeated the trick in the 1980s with – obviously – Dynasty. Amazingly, he did it again in the 1990s with Beverly Hills, 90210, wrenching teen dramas out of John Hughes’ middle class, middle America milieu, and relocating them to his beloved world of the upper class in Beverly Hills. Teen dramas would never look, or be, the same again, and the teen movies from that era, most obviously Clueless as well as Cruel Intentions, She’s All That and even Baz Luhrman’s Romeo + Juliet, all owe a huge debt to 90210. Teenagers no longer looked like teenagers; instead, they looked, dressed and behaved, like models. It is a testament to the success of Spelling’s formula that when 90210 was revived in 2008, its actors made the original cast look like chubby slobs: ever since Brenda (Shannen Doherty) and Brandon Walsh (Jason Priestley) moved to Beverly Hills in 1990, teen actors on screen have got progressively more glamorous and thinner, and it’s hard not to suspect Spelling would have approved. In fact, it’s pretty easy to draw a direct line between the 90s hysteria over 90210 and the current international obsession with the Kardashians. 90210 taught teenagers how to lust after American mega-wealth.
Perry’s Dylan was the stand-out male character from the start, his brooding scowl so much more interesting than clean-cut pretty boy Priestley’s pudgy grin, and he fascinated a generation who had been waiting for a handsome rebel who wasn’t, ideally, Charlie Sheen. We all knew, to a certain extent, that Perry was doing a pastiche of James Dean, but that made him seem classy – classic, even – rather than cliched. In the grand tradition of teen TV stars, he was always, clearly, too old for the role – in all the many parodies of 90210, much was made of Perry’s forehead wrinkles, even though he was, in fact, only 24 when the show premiered. But that meant he was the manly one, the slightly scary one, the one to fancy as a transition to teenagehood and beyond. That he never could quite shake off Dylan McKay merely proves how neatly he filled the role, giving meat to a character that was probably sketched out on the back of a matchbox.
At times it was obvious how constricted he felt by the part, but he never sneered at fans – he knew what he meant to them. For a lot of thirty and fortysomething women around the world today, Perry will always be the thrillingly cool boy from school who asks you – yes YOU – out on a date, turns up to your house on his motorcycle, raising an eyebrow as he takes off his helmet. We mourn the death of Perry because 52 is far too young to die. We 90210 fans mourn the death of Dylan because it is the death of our teenage fantasy.
Comments (…)
Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion