Saved by the Bell: A Few Thoughts

Saved by the Bell is one of the many, many shows I got to know mainly because of how much it has been rerun in the decades since airing its finale. (Just a few years ago several different channels all likely to be part of your cable package had it as a staple of their morning lineups, so that between them you probably had your choice of Saved by the Bell rerun in the same time slot on many a weekday.)

I can't say that I was terribly impressed by what I saw. Consider how all these years later, we find that its prime time contemporaries Seinfeld and The Simpsons in its glorious golden age each gave us hundreds, maybe thousands, of bits that have endured in pop cultural memory--situations, lines, gags--to the point of their being memorialized in Reddit pages and memes as a great many persons still constantly reference them in any situation where they are at all relevant. By contrast I cannot remember a single bit of Saved by the Bell that I have seen referenced in the same way--or which would deserve to be so.

Of course, as the show's long life in reruns reminds one, Saved by the Bell had, and still has, its fans--but at least as adults even those fans seem to be fairly forthright about the weakness of the material that had such a hold on their affections when they were younger. Indeed, former Entertainment Weekly editor Randall Colburn, for example, penned an interesting piece about that a few years ago in which he acknowledged that the show he so loved as a young adult "is the laziest s--- ever made," not least in its peopling Bayside High School "almost exclusively [with] the stalest, most absurd stereotypes: preppy, jock, cheerleader, brainiac . . . geek." This would seem to have been at its absolute worst in the grotesque caricaturing involved in the conception of the nerds--the show presenting them as "effeminate dorks" who "speak in high-pitched squeaks, waddle like penguins, wear tape over their glasses . . . speak at length about pocket protectors," and make every girl (at least, the non-nerd girls) "recoil every time they're near," all as the writers, treating them with more "disdain . . . than any other subgroup" as they picked on "the nerds" every which way they could (not even allowing them to be the one positive thing that a nerd has conventionally been regarded as being, intelligent), gave every impression of "enjoy[ing] bullying these dorks as much as Zack and the gang did."

All of that aligns exactly with my impressions of the show--while Colburn seems to me entirely correct when he remarks that "The Big Bang Theory . . . is basically what would happen if the Saved By the Bell writers tried to write a show about nerds." Still, Mr. Colburn's own observation would seem to refute what seemed to me the argument he most wanted to make in writing this piece, namely that the nerds are a relic of the era of Saved by the Bell which we have since happily moved past. That The Big Bang Theory not only launched almost two decades after Saved by the Bell, (in 2007) but had a twelve season run (2007-2019) and spawned two successor series' (Young Sheldon, which ran for seven seasons itself in 2017-2024, and hitting the air just this past month, George & Mandy's First Marriage--it just never ends!), is testament to how the cheap (and exceedingly lazy) nerd-bashing of Saved by the Bell remains very much with us--with all its profoundly unfortunate implications, which certainly have their complements in the equally simple-minded "positive" images of nerdishness, and by way of contrast with the nerd, the exaltation of the idiocies that people of conventional mind celebrate as "cool".