Shut Up, 90210’s Silver: Station Conversation

Because nothing attracts young audiences like a revival of an early 90s franchise, The CW’s relaunch of 90210 this week earned high ratings but mixed reviews. One of the series’ biggest changes from the original was the inclusion of a character with her own gossip blog, but was this a smart move? Does mainstream television have to incorporate new media into its storytelling in order to be relevant, or are such attempts actually lame efforts to be current and cool? In today’s Station Conversation, Jill Weinberger and Liz Shannon Miller pick sides and take aim at the online world of West Beverly Hills High.

Jill: Here’s the thing: Honestly, the web, vlogging, blogging, etc. are such a huge part of youth culture now that if you don’t use them in a teen/twenties-something show, it’s like Amish TV.

Liz: But it’s a double-edged sword, because if you’re attempting to speak the language of a new medium, then you actually need to know HOW TO SPEAK IT. Otherwise, it’s like writing a show in French but just making up words as you go.

And rarely have I seen someone making up their own French to quite the extent that 90210’s Silver the Blogger does. Silver, you remember, runs a blog featuring self-crafted short animations (both Flash-based and puppet) that mock her fellow students. These videos reach, as purported in the pilot, an audience of 500,000. Because in the world of 90210, 500,000 web viewers are interested in the inter-student drama at West Beverly High.

Jill: And interested in seeing it reenacted with Flash animation, JibJab templates, and little cutout photo puppets. It’s the production values that pull them in, see.

Liz: You know what? If some high schooler really was creating a high-quality satire about her fellow students…no, wait, I still wouldn’t care. Especially since the shorts as presented in the context of the show would make NO sense to an audience unfamiliar with the personalities involved.

Jill: The thing is about Silver is, she is essentially doing a way crappy version of what The CW already has Gossip Girl doing relatively well.

Liz: And with Gossip Girl, it works, because what they’re doing is just building on the pre-existing culture of teen gossip — a tradition passed down from the Sweet Valley High mothership. Instead of pink Princess phones, the kids have BlackBerrys. It’s a natural shift.

Jill: And that’s how you can and should do stuff like this on TV. As opposed to saying in the writers’ room, “We need one of those bloggers. Make the pretty, bitchy girl a blogger.”

Liz: I feel like it’s important at this point to mention one specific conversation from the premiere, in which Jennie Garth, reprising her role as Kelly Taylor, confronts Silver (who is her younger sister) over this crazy blogging thing.

“How many times do we have to talk about this blog of yours?” Kelly Taylor says. “All it does is cause problems.”

“Well, that’s what a blog is supposed to do,” Silver replies. “Cause problems.”

THANK YOU, SILVER, FOR TELLING US WHAT BLOGS ARE FOR. I cannot wait for her next “blogisode.” Which is, yes, EXACTLY WHAT SHE CALLS EACH OF HER UPDATES.

Jill: But do you really believe that the overwhelming wrongness of certain attempts to write new media into TV shows means that writers should just leave it be? ‘Cause I think with most incorporations of new cultural/zeitgeisty crap, it usually needs to be done badly before it’s done well. Otherwise, how will they learn? If we wait for actual contemporaries of the development to become the bulk of the writing staff, the whole thing will be passé and the new kids will be laughing at us from their holodecks. Or something.

I would argue that the issue is: Try to actually write well rather than writing what you assume is appropriate. Also, don’t order a series without a full pilot script and then rush it into production for an early fall premiere. But I will agree that you can’t just stick in random, poorly informed bits of popular culture in a pandering attempt to be youth-friendly.

Liz: Since that alienates the exact audience they’re trying to reach. There’s no better way to prove you’re out of touch than to try and speak the lingo and fail miserably. And at the end of the day, none of these gimmicks help the series on a dramatic level.

Jill: True. But isn’t this more a question of good writers doing good research? ‘Cause it really isn’t hard to get current if you put a little bit of effort into it. I mean, relative to youth culture, I am a dried up old hag, and I still apparently know approximately eleventy billion times more about vlogging than the creators of Silver the evil vlogger.

Liz: Really, I think the reasons for why one show works and one doesn’t comes down to a basic understanding of Web 2.0 principles. Gossip Girl’s use of technology is centered around social networking and communication, which works because human interaction is the basis of good drama. Meanwhile, the closest Silver’s Vlog of Dumb comes to causing human interaction is when someone walks up to another character carrying a laptop — which happens like four times in the first two episodes –

Jill: And says, “Look what the mean girl with the grudge did.”

Liz: And by the way, thank God for the MacBook Air, because those girls have some skinny, skinny arms.

Jill: If Silver is Queen of the vlog views, why is her vlog being distributed via laptop-sharing? Why are people not subscribed on their phones? At least Gossip Girl knows how to Twitter.

Also, Gossip Girl is anonymous. She has no revenge agenda, she has no grudges. She is gossip-agnositic. Silver just gets bitchy whenever she gets mad. How many times can she be obnoxious and piss somebody off and then have the whole situation reset? Either people decide to stop paying attention to her or somebody kills her in a dramatic sweeps event.

Liz: Oh, man, I would love that.

Jill: Naturally she would end up face down in a pool. In a gown.

Liz: And then it’s revealed at the end of the series that her entire blog was being done in flashback, while she died slowly. Drifting in the purest symbol of Southern California excess.

Really, when a sitcom like How I Met Your Mother gets this stuff better than the one network that’s supposed to be tied into youth culture, it’s time to pack up your toys and go home. Or, you know, flail around for a year before being quietly canceled and replaced with Melrose Place Babies.

Jill: I guess I just feel like crappy attempts are an unavoidable part of the process of incorporating new media (or any cultural phenomenon) into TV storytelling. They are lame and pandering and semi-offensive, but at least they are inadvertently amusing for those of us with a healthy sense of superiority and schadenfreude.

Liz: True. I continue to stick by my “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well” stance. But making fun of Silver the Blogger will entertain me to no end for the next few months, I’m sure.

Jill: Coming up next week: Silver learns to make three-dimensional finger puppets and RUINS LIVES!!!! Assuming everybody brings their Mac Air to school.

Liz: I miss Joss Whedon.

Jill: Me too.