Chuck Klosterman on Film and Television

by Chuck Klosterman

  Part of me will always know this was a diabolical thing to do. However, I’m mostly struck by the fact that all my deepest, most sincere feelings are so totally stereotypical that they pretty much apply to every girl I find even vaguely attractive. My feelings toward every woman I’ve ever loved can be completely explained by Paul McCartney’s “Maybe I’m Amazed,” Rod Stewart’s “You’re in My Heart,” and either Matthew Sweet’s “Girlfriend” or Liz Phair’s “Divorce Song” (depending on how long we’ve known each other). My feelings about politics and literature and mathematics and the rest of life’s minutiae can only be described through a labyrinthine of six-sided questions, but everything that actually matters can be explained by Lindsey fucking Buckingham and Stevie fucking Nicks in four fucking minutes. Important things are inevitably cliché, but nobody wants to admit that. And that’s why nobody is deconstructing Saved by the Bell.

  Saved by the Bell is like this little generational secret that’s hyperfamiliar to people born between 1970 and 1977, yet generally unremarkable to anyone born after (and completely alien to all those born before). It was an NBC sitcom that ran for four years (1989 to 1993) after an initial thirteen-episode season on the Disney Channel (where it was originally titled Good Morning, Miss Bliss). The show spawned two spin-offs—Saved by the Bell: The College Years and Saved by the Bell: The New Class—and also included a six-episode summer run (usually referred to as the “Malibu Sands” miniseason) and two made-for-TV movies (one set in Hawaii, the other in Las Vegas).

  It was a program about high school kids.

  I realize that is not much expository information. Typically, one tries to explain TV shows in terms of “context”—if someone asked me to describe The X-Files, for example, I would seem like a moron if I said, “It was a program about two people who mostly looked for aliens.” That would never qualify as a significant description. I would have to write about how the supernatural religiosity of The X-Files personified a philosophical extension of its audience, and how the characters represented two distinct perspectives on modern reality, and how the sexual chemistry between Mulder and Scully was electrified by their lack of physical intimacy. All this abstract deconstruction is necessary, and it’s necessary because The X-Files was artful. However, I have never watched even one episode of The X-Files, because I’m not interested. I’m not interested in trying to understand culture by understanding that particular show, and that’s part of the social contract with appreciating anything artful. You can’t place something into its aforementioned “context” unless you know where (and how) to culturally file it, and I honestly don’t care where The X-Files belongs in the American zeitgeist. Dozens of smart people told me how great this show was, and I’m sure they were right. But I’m satisfied with assuming that program was about two people who mostly looked for aliens, so—as a consequence—the show meant nothing to me. I “don’t get it.”

  That’s not the case with Saved by the Bell. Saved by the Bell wasn’t artful at all. Now, that doesn’t mean it’s bad (nor does it mean it’s good). What it means is that you don’t need to place Saved by the Bell into any context to experience it. I didn’t care about Saved by the Bell any more than I cared about The X-Files, but the difference is that I could watch Saved by the Bell without caring and still have it become a minor part of my life, which is the most transcendent thing any kind of art can accomplish (regardless of its technical merits).

  When I first saw Saved by the Bell, I was a senior in high school. It was on Saturday mornings, usually right when I woke up (which I think was either 11:00 or 11:30 A.M.). It was supposedly the first live-action show NBC ever broadcast on a Saturday morning, an idiom that had previously been reserved for animation. I would watch Saved by the Bell the same way all high school kids watch morning television, which is to say I stared at it with the same thoughtless intensity I displayed when watching the dryer. I watched it because it was on TV, which is generally the driving force behind why most people watch any program. However, I became a more serious Saved by the Bell student when I got to college. I suspect this kind of awakening was not uncommon, as universities always spawn little cultures of terrible TV appreciation: When I was a sophomore, the only non-MTV shows anyone seemed to watch were Saved by the Bell, Life Goes On (that was the show about the retarded kid), Quantum Leap, the Canadian teen drama Fifteen, and Days of Our Lives. And what was interesting was that everybody seemed to watch them together, in the same room (or over the telephone), and with a cultic intensity. We liked the “process” of watching these shows. The idea of these programs being entertaining never seemed central to anything, which remains the most fascinating aspect of all televised art: consumers don’t demand it to be good. It just needs to be watchable. And the reason that designation can be applied to Saved by the Bell has a lot to do with the fundamental truth of its staggering unreality.

  Saved by the Bell followed the lives of six kids at a California high school called Bayside. Architecturally, the school was comprised of one multipurpose classroom, one square hallway, a very small locker room, and a diner owned by a magician. The six primary characters were as follows:

  Zack Morris (Mark-Paul Gosselaar): Good-looking blond kid with the ability to talk directly to the camera like Ferris Bueller; possessed a cell phone years before that was common; something of an Eddie Haskell/James Spader type, but with a heart of gold.

  Samuel “Screech” Powers (Dustin Diamond): Über-geeky Zack sycophant.

  Albert Clifford “A.C.” Slater (Mario Lopez): Good-looking ethnic fellow; star wrestler; nemesis of Zack—except in episodes where they’re inexplicably best friends.

  Kelly Kapowski (Tiffani-Amber Thiessen): Sexy girl next door; love interest of Zack.

  Jessica “Jessie” Spano (Elizabeth Berkley): Sexy 4.00 overachieving feminist; love interest of A.C.

  Lisa Turtle (Lark Voorhies): Wildly unlikable rich black girl; vain clotheshorse; unrequited love interest of Screech.

  Every other kid at Bayside was either a nerd, a jock, a randomly hot chick, or completely nondescript; it was sort of like Rydell High in Grease. There were several noteworthy kids from the Good Morning, Miss Bliss era who simply disappeared when the show moved to NBC (this is akin to what happened to people like Molly Ringwald and Julie Piekarski when The Facts of Life changed from an ensemble cast to it’s signature Blair-Jo-Natalie-Tootie alignment). Tori Spelling portrayed Screech’s girlfriend Violet in a few episodes, Leah Remini served as Zack’s girlfriend during the six episodes set at the Malibu beach resort, an unbilled Denise Richards appeared in the final episode of the Malibu run, and a now-buxom Punky Brewster played a snob for one show in the final season. Weirdly, a leather-clad girl named Tori (Leanna Creel) became the main character for half of the last season when Thiessen and Berkley left the show, but then they both reappeared at graduation and Creel was never seen again (I’ll address the so-called “Tori Paradox” in a moment).

  But—beyond that—the writers of Saved by the Bell always seemed to suggest that most adolescents are exactly the same and exist solely as props for the popular kids, which was probably true at most American high schools in the 1980s.2 The only other important personality in the Bayside universe is Mr. Belding (Dennis Haskins), who is a principal of the John Hughes variety; there is no glass ceiling to his stupidity. However, Belding differs from the prototypical TV principal in that he tended to be completely transfixed by the school’s most fashionable students; he really wanted Zack to like him, and Belding and Morris would often join forces on harebrained schemes.

  On the surface, Saved by the Bell must undoubtedly seem like everything one would expect from a dreadful show directed at children, which is what it was. But that’s not how it was consumed by its audience. There was a stunning recalibration of the classic “suspension of disbelief vs. aesthetic distance” relationship in Saved by the Bell, and it may have accidentally altered reality (at least for brief moments).

  Here’s what I mean: In 1993, Saved by
the Bell was shown four times a day. If I recall correctly, two episodes were on the USA Network from 4:00 to 5:00 P.M. CST, and then two more were on TBS from 5:05 to 6:05. It’s possible I have these backward, but the order doesn’t matter; the bottom line is that I sometimes watched this show twenty times a week. So did my neighbor, a dude named (I think) Joel who (I think) was studying to become a pilot. Sometimes I would walk over to Joel’s place and watch Saved by the Bell with him, and he was the type of affable stoic who never spoke. He was one of those quiet guys who would offer you a beer when you walked into his apartment, and then he’d silently drink by himself, regardless of whether you joined him or not. Honestly, we never became friends. But we sort of had this mute, parasitic relationship through Saved by the Bell, and I will always remember the singular significant conversation we had: We were watching an episode where Belding was blackmailing Zack into dating his niece, and Joel suddenly got real incredulous and asked, “Oh, come on. Who the fuck has that kind of relationship with their high school principal?”

  Of all the things that could have caused Joel to bristle, I remain fascinated by his oddly specific observation. I mean, Bayside High was a school where students made money by selling a “Girls of Bayside” calendar, and it was a school where oil was discovered under the football team’s goalposts. This is a show where Zack had the ability to call time-out and stop time in order to narrate what was happening with the plot. There is never a single moment in the Saved by the Bell series that reflects any kind of concrete authenticity. You’d think Zack’s unconventional relationship with an authority figure would be the least of Joel’s concerns. However, this was the only complaint he ever lodged against the Saved by the Bell aesthetic, and that’s very telling.

  Now, I realize there is some precedent for this kind of disconnect: Trekkies generally have no problem with the USS Enterprise moving at seven times the speed of light, but they roll their eyes in disgust if Spock acts a little too jovial. Within any drama, we all concede certain unbelievable parameters, assuming specific aspects of the story don’t go outside the presupposed reality. But I think Joel’s take on Saved by the Bell is different than the usual contradiction. What it made me realize is that people like Joel (and like me, I suppose) were drawn to this unentertaining show because we felt like we knew what was going to happen next. Understanding Saved by the Bell meant you understood what was supposed to define the ultrasimplistic, hyperstereotypical high school experience—and understanding that formula meant you realized what was (supposedly) important about growing up. It’s like I said before: Important things are inevitably cliché. Zack’s relationship with Belding—and his niece—was just too creative, and bad television is supposed to be reassuring. Nobody needs it to be interesting.

  Take a show like M*A*S*H, for instance. M*A*S*H consciously aspired to be “good television.” Its goal was to be intellectually provoking (particularly over its final four seasons), so almost every plot hinged on a twist: The North Korean POW was actually more ethical than the South Korean soldier, Colonel Potter’s visiting war buddy was actually corrupt, a much-decorated sergeant was actually killing off his black platoon members on purpose, etc., etc., etc. The first ten minutes of every M*A*S*H episode set strict conditions; the next twenty minutes would illustrate how life is not always as it seems.3 This—in theory—is clever, and it’s supposed to teach us something we don’t know. Meanwhile, Saved by the Bell did the opposite. The first ten minutes of every episode put a character (usually Zack) in a position where he or she was tempted to do something that was obviously wrong, and their friends would warn them that this was a mistake. Then they would do it anyway, learn a lesson, and admit that everyone was right all along. Saved by the Bell wasn’t ironic in the contemporary sense (i.e., detached and sardonic), and it wasn’t even ironic in the literal sense (the intentions and themes of the story never contradicted what they stated ostensibly). You never learned anything, and you weren’t supposed to.

  Take the episode from the gang’s senior year, where they went to a toga party hosted by a bloated jock nicknamed Ox. They all get drunk, but Zack claims to be able to drive Lisa’s car home.4 Before they climb into the vehicle, they all note how this is dangerous, because Zack might wreck the car. And (of course) he does just that. Obviously, NBC would claim this was a “message” episode, and it was supposed to show teenagers that alcohol and the highway are a deadly combination. But there’s really no way anyone would learn anything from Zack’s booze cruising. There’s no kid in America who doesn’t know that drinking and driving is dangerous, and there’s no way that you could argue Saved by the Bell made this sentiment any more “in your face” than when Stevie Wonder sang “Don’t Drive Drunk.” It served no educational purpose, and it served no artistic purpose. But what it did was reestablish everyone’s moral reality. If Saved by the Bell was a clichéd, uncreative teen sitcom (and I think we would all agree that it was), it needed to deliver the clichéd, uncreative plot: If these kids drink and drive, they will have to have a bad accident—but no one will actually die, because we all deserve a second chance. As I watched that particular episode in college, I took satisfaction in knowing that American morality was still basically the same as it had been when I was thirteen years old. It proved I still understood how the mainstream, knee-jerk populace looked at life, even though my personal paradigm no longer fit those standards.

  Saved by the Bell was well-suited for conventional moralizing, because none of the characters had multifaceted ethics (or even situational ethics). Every decision they made was generated by whatever the audience would expect them to do; it was almost like the people watching the show wrote the dialogue. This was damaging to the Saved by the Bell actors, all of whom went to ridiculous lengths to avoid being typecast as their TV identities once the show ended. Berkley was the most adamant about her reinvention, taking the lead role in the soft-porn box-office failure Showgirls, which even her costars couldn’t fathom. “I wouldn’t see why you’d want to go so far afield to change your image that you’d take a role so demanding or drastic as that,” said a remarkably candid Screech in an 2002 interview with The Onion A.V. Club. “It pretty much was just the exploitation of a Saturdaymorning icon, I feel. I don’t think that the movie had any more substance than, ‘Hey, we should go check it out to see the girl from Saved by the Bell naked!’ That’s pretty much what everyone went to the theater to see.”

  Yet Berkley was not alone; she was merely the only one who exposed her nipples. Thiessen elected to become the new Shannen Doherty on Beverly Hills, 90210 and smoked pot in her very first episode. Lopez portrayed a homosexual as the star of Breaking the Surface: The Greg Louganis Story. Diamond started a prog rock band (!) who call themselves Salty the Pocket Knife. Gosselaar may have actually made the most disturbing transition, as he dyed his hair black and joined the cast of NYPD Blue, one of the most serious police dramas on TV; he essentially became an altogether different person. Only Lark Voorhies moved in a “logical” direction, taking a role on the soap opera The Bold and the Beautiful.

  I’m not sure what all that signifies, really. I suppose it just proves how trapped these people must have felt, although some of that is clearly their own fault; Zack, Slater, Screech, and Kelly all appeared in the lone season of Saved by the Bell: The College Years, and Screech played a faculty member for most of the seven-season run of Saved by the Bell: The New Class. Those latter two shows—neither of which I watched consistently—made for a comfortable transition of loss: I saw the Saved by the Bell characters constantly, then periodically, and then not at all. It was actually a lot like my relationship with the friends from college who used to watch the show with me; I once saw guys like Joel constantly, then periodically, and then never. Which brings me to the aforementioned “Tori Paradox,” a desperate move by the Saved by the Bell producers that accidentally became the program’s most realistic avenue (and probably the clearest example of how there’s nothing more true than a cliché).

  T
he Tori Paradox is a little like the season of Dukes of Hazzard when Bo and Luke were momentarily replaced by their cousins Coy and Vance, two guys who were exactly like them (so much so that the blond guy still preferred to drive). Here’s the crux of the incongruity: For half of the “senior year” at Bayside, Jessie (Berkley) and Kelly (Thiessen) are completely part of the action, just as they’d been for the last three seasons. However, they’re suddenly absent for twelve consecutive episodes, having been replaced by “Tori,” an attractive, brassy brunette in a black leather jacket who displays elements of both their personalities. Within moments of her arrival, Tori is completely absorbed into the Bayside gang; she’s romantically pursued by Zack and Slater and generally behaves as if she has always been one of their closest friends. This lasts until the graduation episode (aired in prime time), when Kelly and Jessie suddenly reappear as if nothing ever happened. Meanwhile, Tori does not appear at graduation and is not even mentioned.

  The motivation for these moves were purely practical; Berkley and Thiessen wanted to leave the cast, but NBC wanted to squeeze out a dozen more episodes of a show that was now quite popular (and being rerun four times a day on other networks). NBC essentially shot the graduation special (and another prime-time movie, Saved by the Bell Hawaiian Style), embargoed them for later use, and queued up the Tori era. It was the easiest way to extend the series. However, this rudimentary solution created a seemingly unfathomable scenario: Since both the “Tori episodes” and the “Kelly/Jessie episodes” were shown concurrently—sometimes on the same day—we were evidently supposed to conclude that these adventures were happening at the same time. Whenever we were watching Zack’s attempts to scam on Tori, we were asked to assume that Kelly and Jessie were in the lunch room or at the mall or sick, and it was just a coincidence that nobody ever mentioned them (or introduced them to Tori, or even recognized their existence).