'90210' recap: Sex, booze, and...bowling?
Sep 10, 2008, 01:56 AM | by Ken Tucker
Categories: Television, Who Else Remembers This?
So we’ve arrived at week 2 of 90210, and are beginning to get a better sense, perhaps, of how it's going to shape up as a series. For sure, last night's episode was at least as much about the adult characters as it was about the teens, which immediately distinguishes it from Gossip Girl and The Hills, two shows whose audience 90210 wants to attract (along with, it hopes for the sake of its ad sales, at least a million more viewers than those two series). I saw it as a sign of impudent strength that 90210 took a shot at MTV's putative “reality” show, when, in the midst of emoting, Ethan told Annie he was going to “save most of that for my audition for The Hills.”
More 90210, including Ryan + Kelly, the return of Shannen Doherty, and a real-live tour of the set of West Beverly High, after the jump!
If most subplots in last night's episode felt like we’d seen 'em before, it was still, well, kinda cute. It’s hard to dislike an episode built around a bowling alley — bowling is noisy, old-fashioned, and fitfully fun: the opposite of last week's straining-to-be-too-cool for two hours. The notion of the Wilson clan having a mandatory "family night" of knocking down pins — accompanied, it turned out, by most of the Wilson kids’ friends — was initially alarming. I feared the more seasoned bowlers on the Lucky Strike alleys would mistake the far-too-skinny Annie and Silver for pins and start aiming at them. Eat more of those fries, girls!
I suppose there’s some core dramatic problem with the fact that 90210's central love triangle (that would be Annie-Ethan-Ty) didn't turn up the heat at all last night. Heck, the night’s biggest smooch went to teacher Ryan kissing guidance counselor Kelly, and you know when Jennie Garth is still at the center of a 90210, it’s got to worry The CW about keeping its youth demo down. On the other hand: yay, Jennie Garth!
And questions of frail weight gain aside, I liked the way Jessica Stroup handled Silver’s my-mom's-a-drunk-so-I-sleep-at-women's-shelters plot. Silver's got an undercurrent of anger that works nicely against the soppiness of that setup. Plus, just as last week Jessica Walter proved that the best acting on this show is done by mature women depicting women with drinking problems, darned if Silver’s mom didn’t turn in the night's best performance as a truly mean drunk. (By the way, why no Walter? We need her swanning around sarcastically. As for the other notable absence: the coming attractions revealed that we'll see one of Shannen Doherty's handful of scheduled appearances next week.)
I also liked the slight twist on the daughter-catching-daddy-having-an-affair scenes. Naomi's extravagant woe — “I saw my dad kissing another woman!” as if Naomi doesn't cheat on guys her own young self — was countered by her mom's calm acceptance of it all. She knows about the affair and lives with it, because it keeps her in the 90210 zip code. I’d say she was decadently cynical, but actually with real estate in the tank, she probably just realizes she'd get nothing in a split-up.
Oh, and how about the fact that we must presume that Navid’s porn-producer dad showed him and his 90210 pals an advance cut of Quantum of Solace? Mind you, once again the following grade is for last night’s episode only. But for the slight improvements over last week and for the clever/coy Bond film reference, I'm giving it a B-.
Join Jessica Shaw on a tour of West Beverly High, and let us know what you thought of the episode below!
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