To the uninitiated, Luke Perry will always be best known for his 199-episode run as Dylan from Beverly Hills, 90210. Slick and rebellious, Dylan was our James Dean, so long as James Dean came from an immensely privileged background and was fond of pulling faces like Clint Eastwood accidentally swallowing vinegar.
Dylan’s iconic status felt so precision-engineered, so flawlessly designed to send teenage girls into fits of wild abandon, that the danger was that he would overshadow everything else Perry ever did. However, his determination and strong work ethic meant that he was eventually able to escape such a long shadow.
Two years after 90210 debuted, Perry was already keen to maximise on his teen idol status, playing Oliver Pike in the original 1992 film of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Although straighter and frothier than the eventual TV remake, Perry stood out; demonstrating much more range than he’d previously shown. He never got to murder any monsters on TV, at least.
After filling time with TV guest spots and small film roles, 2002 saw Perry win the lead in Showtime’s post-apocalyptic drama Jeremiah. Created by J Michael Straczynski, Jeremiah was slightly too ahead of its time. Had it been made five years later, when television was madly in mid-Lost thrall to high-concept ideas such as these, it might be more fondly remembered. As it stands, Jeremiah marked an important waypoint in Perry’s career. No longer a teen idol, he was starting to grow into his face, and the depth he was always capable of began to show.
Then, arguably, came his high point. John from Cincinnati was a weird show in 2007, but watched back more than a decade later it’s truly befuddling. A noirish drama about the Californian surf scene, created by Deadwood’s David Milch (who claimed not to know what it was about), it was a dreamy and aimless series about a mysterious teleporting Jesus figure who spoke in long, elliptical, mystical paragraphs about nothing at all. Perry played the closest thing it had to an antagonist, and I’ll be damned if this clip doesn’t make me want to go back and watch the whole thing all over again.
Five years after the deep-orbit weirdness of John from Cincinnati, Perry retreated to the safe space of network television, taking a role two series in on the generic ABC drama Body of Proof, about a peppy coroner trying to reconnect with her estranged daughter. It was the sort of show that felt like it had been written by an algorithm and Perry had a beard in it. That’s about it.
However, during this time, it always felt like Luke Perry’s greatest character was Luke Perry himself. He appeared as himself countless times throughout his career; on Family Guy, on Johnny Bravo, in the Italian snowboard comedy Vacanze di Natale ’95. But the most definitive of these appearances came with the 1993 Simpsons episode Krusty Gets Kancelled, where he plays Krusty the Clown’s worthless half-brother. His spot demonstrated his proficiency with balloon sculptures; something that, in light of Colin Hanks’ recent story about him, now has added poignancy.
Perry’s greatest accomplishment, sadly, came right at the end of his life. Riverdale now feels like the grand culmination of his entire career. Like Beverly Hills, 90210, it was a teen drama. Like Buffy, it had supernatural elements. Like John from Cincinnati, it owes much to Twin Peaks. Like Body of Proof, he had a beard in it. And it finally allowed Perry to show off the character acting he had always been capable of. His Riverdale performance points to a rich future that will now no longer come.
