There is a cottage industry built around Saved by the Bell, the beloved teen comedy that ran on NBC from 1989 to 1993. There was a Lifetime biopic last fall, there’s a Saved by the Bell musical currently running in New York, and, of course, Buzzfeed can always be counted on for a Saved by the Bell article or two. But it is Jimmy Fallon who wins the trophy for best revival of the show, when he featured five of the original actors reprising their roles on Wednesday’s episode of The Tonight Show.
To celebrate a string of shows in Los Angeles, Fallon enlisted Mark-Paul Gosselaar, Tiffani (Amber) Thiessen, Elizabeth Berkley, Mario Lopez, and Dennis “Mr Belding” Haskins, to revisit Bayside High. In the sketch, Fallon plays an original member of the gang who moves to New York to join the cast of Saturday Night Live. Really it was just an excuse to revisit some of the show’s old gags, like Zack’s giant cellphone, Slater’s leotard, and Jessie’s “I’m so excited, I’m so excited, I’m so scared” speech. There were some new jokes too, especially a great one about Berkley turning into a stripper thanks to her notorious role in Showgirls.
Not all of the cast were in attendance, however. Lark Voorhies, who played Lisa Turtle was remarkably absent. It makes sense that Dustin Diamond was not invited. His relationship with the rest of the cast has been rocky for years and he was recently arrested for stabbing a man in a bar fight in Wisconsin. I have a feeling that no one even made a call to Leanna Creel, who played Tori in later seasons of the show. Poor Tori.
This is not the first time that Jimmy Fallon tried to get the cast back together. In 2009 he said on his then new late night show that he wanted to get them all to join him but couldn’t pull it off. The cast reunited instead for a photoshoot for People magazine. Diamond was not invited and was cropped out of the old cast photos used in the spread.
What Fallon did was a loving recreation of a show that millions of teenagers adored, and it was great for the ratings. His ratings for the LA trip have been up 27% and the Saved by the Bell stunt gave the show its best Wednesday night ratings in over a year. A video of the scene has already scored more than 1.7m views on YouTube.
This is by all means a success. And even better, we get to see just how well the actors on the show have aged. With the exception of poor Mr Belding, they look even better than they did 15 years ago stalking the halls of Bayside. But all the actors have moved on. Gosselaar has been on several shows including the recently cancelled Franklin & Bash, Lopez has found a second career as a TV presenter, Thiessen is still on White Collar, and Berkeley, well, she was in Showgirls.
Maybe it’s time for the rest of us to move on too. Fallon gave us this great gift with this absolutely perfect recreation, so maybe it’s time to put this particular pop culture obsession behind us. There are so many great shows on the air now, so many other things that we can be investing our time in, so many other memories of our own that we could be revisiting that have nothing to do with other people’s fictional high school experience. We don’t need to see Zack Morris all grown up (and looking more handsome than ever) to feel that we’re grown up. We each have a lifetime of memories to know that it’s true.
Maybe it’s time to put Saved by the Bell on the shelf for good and focus on something new rather than pulling it down every time we need to feel cool or young or relevant. Or at least do that until Bayside! The Musical comes to a town near you.
