I admit that my love for the TV show Saved by the Bell is based purely on nostalgia. The show, nestled in with NBC’s Saturday morning cartoons for several years in the late 80’s and early 90’s, was a hit that made its stars teen idols and spawned spinoff shows and even TV movies.
I watched it, and its various incarnations, every Saturday morning when it originally aired, and in subsequent years, when its reruns were played endlessly on cable. Some of my happiest memories involve sitting in front of the television with my brother and laughing at the ridiculousness of this teen high school comedy. I loved the fictional high school that the show was set in (Bayside). I loved the core group of characters (especially Kelly). I loved the cheesy plots and terrible jokes (and there were many). But in retrospect, I can recognize that the show wasn’t as good as I remember. In fact, I’m not sure that it was ever any good at all.
One look at the production values, wardrobe choices, sets, and cast of the show tells you about the quality, or lack thereof, of Saved by the Bell. Like many sitcoms of that time, the show was filmed in front of a (highly expressive and excitable) studio audience, using a multi camera set up. The sets were of the bare-bones variety: they didn’t resemble a high school in the real world, but they also didn’t resemble a fake made-for-TV one either. They just resembled sets. Authenticity was never really the priority anyway.
The action of the show mainly occurred in the halls of the school. There wasn’t much variety from episode to episode. And whenever something dramatic did happen, it was usually accompanied by cheesy musical cues that amplified the drama or humor of a given situation. For example, if Kelly got mad at her boyfriend Zack and told him that he was being a jerk, the end of that scene would be punctuated by an exaggerated dramatic musical cue. Or when the show’s resident bumbling idiot, Screech, engaged in his typical wacky hijinks, the musical cue was always something silly and whimsical. It was essentially “TV For Dummies”.
Saved by the Bell was never complex or filled with nuanced characters. You knew what you were getting and for the most part, you got it. Usually, the storylines taught a lesson or attempted to capture the high school experience, in the span of 22 minutes.
The show’s actors fit a specific physical type. There was the dumb jock, the nerd, the rich girl, the pretty cheerleader, the smart overachiever, the charismatic wise ass and the school principal who was also inexplicably a friend to them all.
The storylines which accompanied the characters were always very simplistic. They tended to trivialize real world problems by stuffing them into the span of a single episode. Perhaps the best example of this was the episode in which smart girl character Jessie Spano gets herself addicted to caffeine pills. Drug addiction ended up as more of a punchline than something to be taken seriously.
I didn’t watch Saved by the Bell because I was looking for award winning television. I watched the show because I was a kid. I wanted to have fun, laugh, and maybe learn something too. I didn’t care if the plots made sense or the characters were smart. I was less savvy than audiences are now.
TV is as different as I am now. A show like Saved by the Bell could never exist today. It’s too earnest, too cheesy, too squeaky clean, and sometimes too stupid for the audience that watches programming today. The world was a different place in the 90’s. We can’t go back to that. I’m not sure we should anyway.
I think more than Saved by the Bell, what I am truly nostalgic about is a time before computers and technology when everything felt a little more innocent, a little less calculated and maybe a little dumber… and this show takes me to that time.
I still can watch an episode and be transported back to that mystical time in my youth when life was never really too complicated and all you needed was your group of friends. Except Screech. No one ever really needed him.
Madonna Writes 