In April of 2011, ComicsOnline.com gave site reviewer Erin Hatch a mission: Watch screening dvds for several upcoming shows. Tormented by the assignment, the man turned to drinking and disappeared from the face of the earth. One week later, a tattered journal appeared on the doorstep of Senior Media Editor, Matt Sernaker. Among various chronicles of his spiritual journey, the document contained the three TV reviews. ComicsOnline is proud to present the Drunken Geek Review of 90210:
Eight hours later I woke up in my apartment surrounded by unconscious ballet dancers and empty bottles. I was awakened by the sound of an episode of 90210 – “The Enchanted Donkey”. The name alone jolted me back to sobriety at the speed of sound, and so I had to re-drink to prime myself for what was to come. It turns out that, like Gossip Girl, 90210 is about rich kids with problems, only this show takes place on the west coast, not the east, and instead of the upper east side of Manhattan, we follow teenagers from Beverly Hills, California. Also, unlike Gossip Girl, I had never seen an episode of 90210, so I went into this den of teenage angst with absolutely no forewarning about who these spoiled kids were and why they hated each other.
I had heard of the original Beverly Hills, 90210 back when I was a kid in the 90s, I mean, who hadn’t? It was THE show to watch, amiright? Unfortunately, I was always a couple years too young to actually follow the show. It was always the show for teenagers, a group of cool people that I was too young to understand or sympathize with, right up until its cancellation when I was a teenager myself. Now the show has been rebooted for a new generation, and I am too old to understand these crazy kids.
The episode, “The Enchanted Donkey,” follows a group of kids as they head out on spring break, going down to Cabo to paaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarty, as it were. That’s right, a party with 18 a’s.* In case you are not versed in the sacred arts of celebration, that is a Category 1 Event. Now these kids had problems. One was addicted… to drugs! Two were former best friends fighting over a boy! One was gay, and looking for sex without a relationship… until he realized he wanted a relationship! Obviously serious business. Despite the misleading title, there were no enchanted donkeys in this episode, just a hotel named after an apparently mystical pack animal.
Assuming that 90210 is hard to follow as a newcomer, the show wasn’t exactly bad. The big problem I had with it was that the plots were spread out over so many characters that very little seemed to actually get done. You had three or four scenes for most of the plots, sometimes less. Most of these plots were continuations of ongoing story arcs from previous episodes. All of these things make it hard to judge the series from an individual episode. I guess the show has its heart in the right place, even if the plot seems to be spread a little thin, but you would have to be very much enamored of the type of lifestyle lived by these glamourous Californians to want to give this show a chance by watching it all the way through.
I would especially like to note that I just spent my spring break getting drunk by myself at home and watching a CW show about beautiful rich teenagers flying down to Cabo for Spring break and still having silly problems. I would put out my own eyes with chopsticks to have the problems that these kids were having. If you would like to counter my argument against the show, please email [email protected] with the Subject line “Hatch is a douchebag.” Thank you.
ComicsOnline gives 90210 – “The Enchanted Donkey” 2.5 out of 5 Luke Perrys.
Stay tuned to ComicsOnline.com for everything geek pop culture and keep an eye out for future Drunken Geek Reviews coming soon!
*= A footnote. Despite my intoxication, I made the effort to count each “a” in that party. Any mistakes in counting can be blamed upon Mr. Jack Daniels, Mr. Bolivar Coca, or Mr. Christopher Cola.
After this, Mr. Hatch stopped writing in English. ComicsOnline’s elite translation squad discovered that Mr. Hatch used a script consisting of Na’vi nouns and Klingon verbs arranged with the sentence structure of Tolkien’s Elvish and written using the Aurebesh alphabet from Star Wars. The adjectives were not from any identified language.
