Saved by the Bell is one of the most iconic teen sitcoms of the 90s, but it's also a
product of its time that got away with things that wouldn't fly nowadays. From dubious addictions
to ill-advised attempts at romance, here are the episodes that just wouldn't happen today.
As a kid, you probably laughed along with super cool teen heartthrob Zack Morris as he got up to
his zany exploits. But when you think about Saved by the Bell now, the first thing you realize is
that Zack is quite possibly the worst person in the world. He's casually cruel to his friends,
he's constantly exploiting others to get money, and most of all, he's a total creep
to the women who have the bad luck to be trapped in the orbit of his endless scheming.
A perfect example is season two's "Model Students,"
in which the plot revolves around a mixture of Zack's two favorite hobbies: capitalism and
revenge. After utterly failing to line his pockets by making the school store a profitable business,
he and Screech decide to secretly take pictures of the girls' swim team to make calendars.
This doesn't even lead to Zack getting a stern talking-to. Instead, when a creepy photographer
shows up in pursuit of more salacious photos of underage girls taken without their consent,
Zack preys on his victims' desire for fame and weasels his way into becoming
the girls' manager. If this plot happened today, we'd hope that it would lead to less
of Zack getting a ten percent commission and more of him meeting his comeuppance.
"Fatal Distraction" might not be as bad as some other Saved by the Bell episodes,
although it does feature Zack dressed up as a cartoonish Arab stereotype in order to better lie
to women. So yeah, it's still pretty awful. The plot finds Zack bugging a sleepover at Jessie's
house in order to get some information that he can use to gaslight Kelly into going on a date
with him. Some viewers might recognize this as essentially the plot of the TV show You
scaled down to high school. It's also pretty standard as far as Zack goes.
The twist comes when the girls discover Zack's bug and decide to mess with him
by making him think that Kelly is criminally insane and will kill him if they start dating.
This episode wouldn't fly today for several reasons. First and foremost,
illegal surveillance done to manipulate someone into dating you is, to put it charitably,
frowned upon. Second, if you've been on TikTok lately, you've probably noticed that today's
teens are a little more sensitive and far less likely to fake a mental illness for revenge.
Third, Zack would obviously know something was wrong with Kelly's story
when he realized that he'd never heard her tale on any true crime podcasts.
Over the course of the series, Zack tries to manipulate his classmates in ways that
would likely end with felony charges today, and probably should've back then.
One of his worst offenses has to be the time he attempts to brainwash the school
through subliminal messages in order to get a date to a dance. But his actions,
as reprehensible as they are, might not actually be the most ill-advised behavior in the episode.
When his plot is discovered, the entire school decides to turn the tables on him, with every
girl at Bayside swarming him while chanting his name. It makes sense that the students would want
this public revenge. Where it goes off the rails, though, is when the teachers get in on it as well.
Both Principal Belding and Miss Wentworth engage in fake seduction attempts on Zack,
who – to be clear – is a high school freshman. Furthermore,
the tape that Miss Wentworth makes to teach the kids about subliminal messages
includes a line about how they should hook her up with their single fathers.
"And if any of you have a handsome single parent, I'm available."
If you look back now and think about this episode for just two seconds,
there's nothing about it that's not truly horrifying.
Season 1's "Screech's Woman" features Zack pretending to be a girl named Bambi in order to
seduce Screech into doing all the work on a group project, and you've probably already figured out
the problem here. All things considered, though, Zack Morris catfishing one of his friends for
personal gain actually does seem like the kind of plot that could work in the 21st century.
If anything, it's only gotten easier to pull off a scam like this in the years since this episode
aired. The show even treats Zack's performance as "Bambi" with a surprisingly modern sensibility.
Sure, it's played for laughs, but unlike similar setups among Saved by the Bell's contemporaries,
Zack's challenge to the gender binary isn't frowned upon by his friends.
Jessie and Lisa help him pick out an outfit, and even Slater seems to approve of the whole thing,
complimenting Zack on his looks when he finds him at The Max.
So what's the problem? Well, it's mainly that Zack looks like Holly
from Die Hard with wrestler Gorilla Monsoon's sunglasses. There's no way that Jessie and
Lisa would let Bambi go out of the house without a better outfit if it were 2020.
In Season 2's "Rent-A-Pop," Zack engages in some highly relatable teenage hijinx by
hiring an actor to impersonate his father at a parent-teacher conference so that his real dad
doesn't find out that he's been spending all of his time at school on truly upsetting schemes.
That premise is already pretty ridiculous, but it's hardly unusual on TV. Taking things
one step past a logical extreme is what makes a sitcom work after all,
and this is far from the wackiest thing that's ever happened at Bayside.
Ultimately, the reasons this episode wouldn't fly today are mostly related to the technology
that's been developed over the past three decades. For one thing, social media would
make it nearly impossible for Zack to convince Mr. Belding that an actor was his dad, no matter how
good a performance he was turning in. Second, and far more pressing for today's audience,
that episode title raises ways too many red flags. These days, going out and finding an
out-of-work actor to pay to be your daddy for a couple of hours has a very different connotation.
"Save the Max" has one of those reliable sitcom plots that never seems to go out of style.
A beloved institution is in danger of financial ruin, so to save it,
our beloved characters have to put on a show! In this case, the institution is The Max,
and the kids use the Bayside High student radio station for a call-in telethon to raise money.
Before we move on, what exactly is The Max? As far as we can tell, it's basically a local
hangout that contains all school functions for some reason, or a weirdly stylized cafeteria
that the kids hang out in after school. If anyone out there has a better explanation,
please let us know because we've been wondering about this for three solid decades.
No matter how you slice it, "Save the Max" is a bit dated.
High school radio stations do still exist, but they're not quite as prominent as they
were before everyone started carrying around a supercomputer in their pocket that could access
virtually all media at all times. If this plot were pitched today,
we'd be far more likely to get an episode in which Zack starts an official Bayside TikTok account
in order to smash capitalism. Then change the subplot about Zack finding out that Mr. Belding
used to be a cool teen DJ by instead making him a former YouTube reviewer of classic video games
who got canceled for being problematic, and now you've got something that's hashtag-relatable.
One thing you have to give to "Running Zack," in which young Mr. Morris learns that racist
stereotypes are bad, is that its heart is in the right place. It's one of the few episodes that
actually addresses the fact that Zack is kind of a terrible person and shows him trying to address
that and improve himself. His methodology, though, leaves quite a bit to be desired. On the one hand,
there are a lot of individual pieces here that feel like they could be relevant to
today's audience, like Jessie grappling with her guilt over finding out that her
ancestors were slave traders and pressuring Lisa to absolve her of her familial sins.
Also, depicting Chief Henry as completely shattering the stereotypical Native American
image held by Zack was an admirable choice on the part of the show.
On the other hand, Zack showing up in buckskins, face paint, and a war bonnet,
identifying himself as "Running Zack" because he's on the track team,
and delivering his class presentation in a stern monotone is less than ideal.
"My heart is sad."
It's tough to imagine the story resolving in quite the same way today,
especially considering that while Zack Morris the character is revealed to have Native ancestry,
Mark-Paul Gosselaar, the actor who played him, does not. No matter how well-intentioned it was,
some justifiable complaints about redface would've kept this one on the cutting room floor.
Most of the memorable episodes of Saved by the Bell stand out because of how weird they are
and how far they wander from their generic roots. Zack cradling an oil-covered duck in
the show's most intense display of emotion or Zack and Screech fooling the government with
an alien encounter hoax are pretty bizarre when you get right down to it. "Snow White
and the Seven Dorks," on the other hand, is about as standard-issue as a sitcom can get.
The plot of two characters having an onstage romance in a school play
that causes them to question their real-life feelings for each other is ready-made drama,
and so are the scenes in which Jessie tries to keep her secret by getting extremely weird
about it. It's such a well-worn formula that it's hard to imagine a show dusting it off
today without doing something to subvert it. Nevertheless, as long as schools have drama
departments and hormonal theater kids, it's going to be a reliable premise.
What really wouldn't work today, though, is the actual play-within-the-play itself.
Saved by the Bell wasn't exactly high art to begin with, so we can forgive it for being a
little cheesy. But pop culture has thankfully moved past the idea that doing a so-called
rap version of a song should consist of a bunch of people simply talking at each other
over a Casio keyboard breakbeat with the cadence of a Fruity Pebbles commercial.
"Dork number 5, I gotta disagree. If you want Snow White alive, don't look at me."
If you know only one episode of Saved By the Bell, it's probably "Jessie's Song," the infamous "very
special episode" that deals with the pressing issue of teen addiction … to caffeine. The
original concept for the episode was that Jessie would get addicted to amphetamines in her pursuit
of academic perfection. Unfortunately, NBC's Standards and Practices department didn't actually
want to show a teenager doing drugs, which made things a little difficult, as the script
had already been written. Ultimately, Jessie's illegal uppers were swapped out for caffeine
pills without changing anything else about the script. As a result, her reaction to ingesting
the equivalent of about five cups of coffee is a manic breakdown of truly epic proportions.
"I'm so excited! I'm so excited! I'm so … (crying)."
It's pretty tough to imagine this one making it to the air nowadays,
although it was admittedly weird even at the time. The problem isn't the subject matter
so much as the execution. It's presented as completely serious without ever crossing the
line into comedy. Despite Elizabeth Berkley and Mark-Paul Gosselaar's admirably intense efforts,
it never really makes much sense. Just compare this episode to a teen show of
today like Riverdale, in which a high school sophomore spends her afternoons operating a
secret speakeasy. To be fair, these two shows take very different approaches to their subject matter,
but if we told you that one of them involved a kid with the unexplained ability to stop time,
and you didn't know which one it was, would you really be able to guess?
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