‘90210’: The old folks get frisky

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This ain’t your grandma’s ‘90210.’ On the original ‘90210,’ Cindy and Jim Walsh were virtually sexless. Just the frumpy parents of Brenda and Brandon, who seemed content to live as feeders and dolers-out of advice to their two perfect-ish Beverly Hills children.

The grown-ups on this incarnation of ‘90210,’ however, are a different breed. They have their very own plotlines, their very own inside jokes, and their very own — get this! — sex lives.

Whether or not you still see her as a teenager, Kelly Taylor is a grown-up by West Beverly standards. She has an adult job, she has a child (or at least she did at the beginning of the season) and she even plays mother hen to high-school-aged Silver. So, for better or for worst, this is an adult. Which is why it was so shocking to see Kelly coming onto bushy-browed teacher Mr. Matthews with such force. Toward the end of Tuesday’s episode, Kelly runs into Mr. Matthews at the grocery store, where he’s buying beer. He is only drinking three, he says; as for the other three, ‘no one’s called ‘em.’ That’s when the Kelly unleashes her inner vamp. ‘I’m kinda thirsty,’ she purrs, her statement oozing with innuendo. Moments later, she has ditched her unstable daughter-figure to get frisky with Ryan, the urgency of their initial embrace suggesting that things go very far, very fast. What would Cindy Walsh think!

There seems to be some confusion about how to treat the vintage characters — Kelly, Donna, Brenda — in this regard. They are adults now, chronologically speaking, and yet it’s hard to believe Kelly could have changed her wily ways all that much in the few years since we saw her last. And so she is stuck in some sort of limbo between being a perfect (read: dull) grown-up and being the dream girl with a naughty streak we knew on vintage ‘90210.’ Hopefully this Ryan/Kelly plot, as it develops, will help strike a realistic balance between Kelly’s two personalities.

And Kelly was hardly the only older character showing a decidedly youthful, impulsive side in Tuesday’s episode. Donna Martin showed her that she doesn’t have it all figured out yet either, by getting drunk and by confessing that her relationship with David Silver is on the rocks. Even Debbie and Harry Wilson got to come out of their shells a bit, if in a decidedly PG manner. Harry got to do a silly voice and put on a silly wig, and Debbie, well, she got to laugh a lot. Still, their playful relationship seems to at least suggest an intimacy that extends beyond their relationship with Dixon and Annie. Thus, in this incarnation of ‘90210,’ the grown-ups have their own lives, apart from their children.

And as the balance tipped from sobriety to recklessness for the older set, the younger set necessarily took on a more mature, chaste role. Navid and Adrianna, whose relationship has graduated from the sexual anxieties of puppy love to the banal realities of domesticity, even decided to get married. How much more grown up can you get? (Note: Their decision to tie the knot would have had a stronger impact if both actors looked 16 and not 26, but you get the point.) It will be interesting to see how Navid and Adrianna’s drastic decision plays out in the sphere of West Beverly life. Lately, the couple has been so removed from the harsh realities of high school that the proposal did not seem all that dramatic.

Anyways, how do you all feel about seeing the inner lives of the grown-ups on ‘90210’? Are you interested in Kelly and Ryan’s hot and heavy romance, or would you prefer to leave the smooching to Naomi and Liam? And also, one unrelated question: Is anybody else hoping Liam has a thing for Ethan?

Till next week!

— Stephanie Lysaght