Beverly Hills 90210: 10-Year High School Reunion (2003) (TV)

Release Date:

8 July 2003 (Australia)

Genre:

Documentary

Plot Keywords:

Beautiful Woman

Cast

Gabrielle Carteris	...	Herself
Shannen Doherty	...	Herself
James Eckhouse	...	Himself
Jennie Garth	...	Herself
Luke Perry	...	Himself
Carol Potter	...	Herself
Jason Priestley	...	Himself
Joe E. Tata	...	Himself
Ian Ziering	...	Himself

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Color

Certification:

Australia:M

Movie Connections:

References "Beverly Hills, 90210" (1990)

Good to see the cast (or at least some of them) again ... that's about it

As the title for this show suggests, this show was set on the 10th anniversary of the main cast's graduation from high school in 1993. In a nutshell what this documentary involves is having most of the main cast from back then talking and discussing the highs, lows, favourite moments and other things that occured during production.

It sounds pretty much like your typical documentary of a now-finished TV series, but unfortuantely this one never seemed to do much beyond us seeing most of the old cast again. The biggest problem is the decision of making it a 'high school reunion' - in other words only cast members who were around in 1993 are here, so bad luck if you want to see someone who joined the cast at a later date. In addition to this Tori Spelling and Brian Austin Green were curiously not present either, so its not even a reunion of the whole original cast.

Another thing that I felt let this down was having all the people in the one room together and discussing their experiences with each other. This is fine for seeing some jokes between the cast, but Luke Perry and Shannon Doherty seemed to dominate around 90% of the discussion which appeared to result in other cast members not getting as involved.

Finally by having them all together in the one room results in an overly-nice, all-friendly atmosphere (as mentioned in the previous review) when in reality we know it wasn't necessarily like that when the show was being made. No mention was made at all of Doherty's infamous split from the show back in 1994 which came partly as a result of bad vibes between herself and some of the other cast members, which was a real pity as I'm sure its those kind of behind-the-scenes occurences that people want to find out about rather than jokes about how bad someone's hair looked back in the early nineties.

Recently I've seen other TV show documentaries for Gilligan's Island and the Brady Bunch. In my opinion these were much more successful because they were proper documentaries looking at the history of those shows and not simply 'reunion specials'. They interviewed the cast members one on one (as opposed to being in a group) and thus were able to get some private confessions from them concerning the show and sometimes even concerning cast members - something this particular reunion lacked.

All in all it was an interesting show to watch for an hour but it could have been so much more. Here's hoping a more serious attempt at looking back on the show is attempted sometime in the future.