BH90210 at TCA: Live-Blog

The cast and producers of BH90210 are promoting their show—which premieres tonight—at TCA. Follow along to see what they have to say…

11:47 AM: How was it getting back together? “I think that everyone who has talked to us about doing a reboot for a long time,” Gabrielle Carteris says. But Jennie Garth and Tori Spelling sat down and hammered out the details.

11:48 AM: “All of the characters are fictionalized versions of themselves,” Tori Spelling says. She says it’s up to the audience to figure out which elements are real.

11:50 AM: Luke Perry was “fully in support” of doing BH90210. He was going to guest on the show, but wouldn’t have been able to do it full time because of his RIVERDALE contract.

11:50 AM: “We were excited for everyone to get comfortable with it on their own terms,” Jennie Garth says. Shannen Doherty notes she didn’t plan to do it—and notes the show would have been fine with or without her—but “when Luke passed away, things drastically changed for me. It felt like a great opportunity to honor him.”

11:52 AM: “We didn’t want to do a straight-forward reboot,” Spelling says. She points out it couldn’t top what they did during the original show’s decade run.”

Garth credits Spelling for her passion and that it wouldn’t have moved forward without it. Carteris adds that Spelling’s detail-orientation was helpful during production.

11:53 AM: The conference today is “very meta, like the show.” (There is a panel for the show in its pilot.)

11:54 AM: “This has been breathtaking,” Carteris says. “I don’t know if I could put into words how meaningful the experience has been.”

11:55 AM: “My kids don’t know 90210; many of our kids don’t know [BH]90210,” Ian Ziering says. “Having them understand Daddy did this show before Mommy, before you were around is something they are starting to wrap their head around.” He has a copy of the show on a hard drive with its original music: it started on VHS and it has been converted.

11:58 AM: “We’ve all that moment where people have impressions of us that we want to work into the show,” Ziering says.

12:00 PM: “A lot of thought went into it,” EP Chris Alberghini says of how they pay tribute to Perry. “We knew we had to acknowledge and pay tribute to him…we wanted to do it as respectful a way as possible. It was something we discussed a great deal with everyone in the cast. Trial and error. There were a few things we tried that didn’t work.”

12:02 PM: “We have a lot of material to cover,” Garth says when asked which 90210 guest stars they’d want to pop up.

“We have fun 90210 stunt casting throughout the series,” Spelling adds.

12:03 PM: Though the actors are close to their real lives, they fictionalized their spouses and children.

12:05 PM: “Originally, the concept was for a half-hour,” Spelling says. It was going to be a half-hour, at the time. And the tone is very different: “It is that blend of drama, comedy, and soap.”

“I think Fox stepped up to the plate,” Garth says. “Collaborating with CBS and Fox, [it]  became this wonderful, delicious soapedy.”

12:07 PM: Ziering says the time was right to do this because this is the real thing. 90210, The CW series, lacked the heart and substance of the original, he says, and he felt they were just using their name. He points out the sequel only lasted five seasons, while the original lived for a decade and had larger success internationally.

12:11 PM: Ziering points to social media’s good use when it comes to getting out buzz for the show: it’s only airing in a few non-USA locations, and the chatter spreads the word.

12:14 PM: “I was proud of it then, but I’m incredibly proud of it now,” Doherty says of Brenda’s cancer scare. “[The real issues] allowed 90210 to be the show that families watched and it opened up the conversation for the families to have with their kids.”

12:16 PM: Spelling and Garth have other projects in the works together. “We like being a team.”

12:17 PM: “What’s really dealt with in the show, even though it’s fun, is relationships,” Carteris says. There’s a lot of questioning in the show: “We all live it, so let’s talk about it.”

12:18 PM: “It was an amazing experience filming in Vancouver,” Alberghini says. “It was a summer camp atmosphere. Everyone left their lives at home and moved up to Vancouver for six, eight weeks…it enabled everyone to focus on the work and the scenes and the storytelling…the decision to film there was made by our studio and network.”

But Carteris hopes they are able to film a potential season 2 in LA.

12:19 PM: “I think this show gave us the opportunity to play the storyline of us being adults and the relationships we have outside of the fictional relationships,” Brian Austin Green says. In the original series, he and Doherty only had 2 or 3 scenes together, he says, and they wanted to do more here. “We got to be ourselves, sort of, and play where we were now. And not just fictionalized characters.”

12:21 PM: There’s a moment in the BH90210 premiere where Spelling and Green do a calming experience. He thinks they did it in real life, but she doesn’t think they did.

12:24 PM: Yes, a lot of episodes are missing from BEVERLY HILLS, 90210’s streaming library.

BH90210, Series Premiere, Wednesday, August 7, 9/8c, Fox

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• BH90210: Fox Sets August Premiere
• BH90210: Shannen Doherty Joins Fox ‘Reboot’
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