Well, our “Saved By The Summer” event finally comes to a close, as Adam and I discuss the under-the-radar 2020 Saved By The Bell “reimagining” that lasted 2 seasons on the Peacock streaming service. Not quite a reboot, and not quite a revival, this version of Saved By The Bell caught up with the characters we had come to love from the original, while it also introduced a new generation of students.
The thing you should know here is that the showrunner was Tracey Wigfield, who had cut her teeth on a few Tina Fey productions, such as 30 Rock and Great News. If you know anything about Tina Fey shows, you know that they tend to be set in a timeline parallel to ours, where things are a tad absurd, and you’re usually seeing it from the POV of a character who feels they’re the only sane one in the bunch. That is the case here, where we’re introduced to Daisy, an overachieving, and slightly neurotic, Latina from Douglas High in “the bad part of town”, who’s forced to transfer to Bayside when Governor Zack Morris (yeah…) closes all the underperforming schools. So, the first season is something of a culture clash between the Douglas kids and their new classmates, the rich and entitled Bayside kids. In the second season, everyone sort of knows their place, as they rejoin their peers after Covid pandemic passes.
I like a lot of the characters here, but the breakout star is actor Josie Totah. She steals every scene she’s in, and I’m almost surprised they didn’t try to give her a spinoff when this show didn’t find an audience. Meanwhile, the OG characters are done something of a disservice, as this particular universe shows them as caricatures of the characters we grew up with. AC Slater is a loser gym teacher, Zack Morris is the Governor of California, while wife, Kelly, peddles holistic scams, while telling everyone she’s a doctor. And Screech is on the International Space Station. Yeah…
I’ll admit it: I originally didn’t love this show. I binged it in a day, and walked away thinking, “Well, that was something.” I even wrote about it then. After finally giving the second season a chance, however, I found I have an appreciation for what they were trying to do here. Did it have staying power? No, but it could have, and that’s part of what we discuss here. If you wanna get the details, you can listen here, or on all major podcast platforms!
