Darren Star attempted to lead the teen sex revolution in the early ’90s, and it was almost televised.
The Emmy Award winner recently recalled that network executives “demanded” he write an episode of Beverly Hills, 90210 in which Brenda (Shannen Doherty) expressed “remorse” after having sex with her boyfriend Dylan (Luke Perry) in the first season’s 1991 penultimate episode ‘Spring Dance’.
“When all these affiliates realized what they’d aired, a lot of them got bent out of shape,” Star told Vulture. “And it wasn’t just the fact that Brenda had sex but that she enjoyed it. When we came back for the next season, they demanded there was an episode where she had remorse. I was like, I can’t believe I have to write this. She had a pregnancy scare. She realized she was too young to have sex.”
He noted that the hit teen drama’s first season featured “a lot of edgier episodes” as the network execs apparently “weren’t paying attention” to what they put on the air. When 90210 blew up ahead of Season 2, the bosses suddenly “had a lot of notes.”
Star explained, “Everything about sexuality was hard to deal with. Initially, they were like, ‘Where are the parents? Where are the teachers?’ And I’m like, it’s not a show about parents and teachers. It’s a show about these friends who were there for each other, solving each other’s problems.”
After Doherty died at 53 last month, following a long struggle with breast cancer, Star remembered the actress as “an incredibly special, dynamic person” who brought “so much spirit and determination and complication” to the character of Brenda Walsh.
“What she brought inspired me to write toward Brenda even more,” said Star. “She was herself an independent spirit who felt everything deeply. She captured something about being a teenage girl who really was a powerful girl.”