For reasons passing even my own understanding, I downloaded all of Saved By The Bell: The New Class recently. I’ve been playing a game on Switch that is very grindy, so something to have on TV and not have to pay full attention to while playing in handheld mode is nice.
I quite liked the original Saved By The Bell when I was a kid and I still have nostalgia for it (I’m not convinced how much it’d hold up to modern viewing, especially after seeing TNC). I think it helped that I was about 5 or 6 when I started watching it. If I’d been the same age as the characters, I don’t think I’d have been at all interested. But I was all in on those Peter Engel shows in my single digit years: SBTB, Hang Time, California Dreams especially and The New Class. But I only ever caught the latter sporadically, on both TCC and Channel 4, and it never seemed to have the same cast members between episodes. That’s a reason why I decided to go through it, starting with season 1 and… wow is it bad.
There’s two main problems. (Well, three if you want to include the scripts, but I can’t imagine they’re much, if any, worse than the ones original SBTB had). First is that the acting is broadly terrible. The cast are, admirably, all roughly the same age as the characters, there’s no 25-year olds as teens (well, maybe for some of the minor roles) but that means they’re not desperately well trained. They don’t gel well and they’re all delivering their lines awkwardly. Someone really needed to just spend some time with them, as a group, and get them to relax a bit.
The other problem is the set of characters. They’re mostly fine, with two exceptions. You have Vicky, a sort of generic 90s awkward headcase (she’s vegan! she’s a hypochondriac! she’s for animal rights probably!); Megan, the smartest girl in school (played by Beyonce’s half-sister); Lindsay, who… is just blandly nice; Tommy D, Lindsay’s biker-ish boyfriend; then Scott and Weasel, who are basically clones of Zack and Screech.
I can sort of see why they felt recreating that was a good idea, but it really isn’t. It makes the whole show feel like “here’s a bunch of knock offs” rather than just “here’s another group of kids”, especially as they initially have Scott break the fourth wall the way Zack did. The bigger issue is just that the actor playing Scott, Robert Sutherland Telfer, has negative charisma. The Zack/Scott archetype is a charming con man type, a loveable rogue. Mark Paul Gosselaar nailed that. Telfer just makes Scott seem like a sleazy dickhead. The stories don’t help: in the first episode he falls for Lindsay and starts trying to manipulate her into breaking up with Tommy D for him – in the second episode he’s resorted to dressing in drag and posing as his own cousin to attend a sleep-over to gaslight Lindsay into thinking she has nothing in common with Tommy – but Telfer just seems like a creep the entire time. He’s incapable of conveying sincerity, so when he inevitably has to apologise or show contrition, he still sounds exactly like he did when he was pulling the con or manipulating people. Weasel isn’t as bad, though Isaac Lidsky hams up his lines too much, but ultimately he just does feel like Screech 2.0.
The most interesting thing about this first season is actually what happened to the actors who played Scott and Weasel after SBTB. They were both dropped after season 1 (along with Bonnie Russavage, who played Vicky, who was arguably the best actress in the group). Telfer, allegedly, because of his bad behaviour on set, which extended to trying to pick fights with random extras. He doesn’t have any other acting credits on IMDB but now has a public Facebook page where he posts lots of angry right wing memes. Meanwhile, Isaac Lidsky, (who, like Dustin Diamond before him, was only 14 playing older as Weasel) was diagnosed with a degenerative disease in his eyes that led to him going blind. He went to college at 15, graduated Harvard at 20 with a computer science degree, founded an internet advertising start-up in 1999 that survived the dot-com burst and was sold for millions years later. But he’d left that to go back to Harvard to get a law degree, after which he became a clerk to Supreme Court Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and RBG and is now a famous lawyer and activist.
Very divergent paths from a Saved By The Bell sequel, of all things.
Anyway, I lasted about three and a half episodes into season 1 before just skipping around. I’m mainly just looking for episodes where future famous people show up, such as James Marsden as a popular sleaze in one episode (who out-acts everyone around him, although he was 20, so probably better trained) and Buffy’s Emma Caulfield in a season 2 episode, where she plays a school nurse who has a thing with Screech.
Ah yeah, Screech. So in retooling for season 2, some new kids were brought in. There’s Brian, who is still a bit like Zack and Scott, but it’s dialled back a bit, he doesn’t break the fourth wall and he’s Swiss, for some reason. Then there’s his best mate Bobby, who is more of a unlucky in love loser than a Screech (and played by a guy with the incredible name of Spankee Rodgers. He has no other credits on IMDB and I fear to google him) and rich girl Rachel, who had been in an episode in season 1. She’s played by Sarah Lancaster, who actually progressed to a decent career in things like Chuck (to be fair, Linsday and Megan’s actresses have subsequently done stuff as well, I’m just not familiar with any of it).
But the main addition is Screech, who returns to the school as an admin assistant to Mr Belding. It… doesn’t work. He’s incredibly annoying, which admittedly is Screech’s whole deal, but his dynamic with Mr Belding is just odd and it feels like a desperation move all round. Dustin Diamond is fresh off the just cancelled SBTB: The College Years and really this should have been the point in his career when he went off to reinvent himself, as the others did. Instead, he retreated to the security of Screech for six more seasons, which killed his career long-term, because he became indivisible from the character. But ultimately it just gets in the way of the actual kids taking centre stage fully.
The acting seems marginally better for season 2, but the weirdest bit is that all the episodes, in air date order, are out of order. First episode, everyone is going back to school (presumably for the start of a new years, but possibly just term). Second episode: school’s out for summer, Belding and Screech are working at a country club (huh?) and the kids are hired on as staff (huh?). There’s about six episodes set in that country club, along with two at Screech’s cousin’s dude ranch (of course) and they’re just sprinkled through out the series. The two part series finale (set at the school, just to make the timeline make less sense) didn’t air consecutively either. American TV, man.
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I know more about what Walz did as governor than what Harris aimed to do as President.
