Beverly Hills 9021-Oh
This post is brilliant and I’m sorry I didn’t think of it first: a look at the bodies of the new Beverly Hills 90210 cast compared to the previous cast. It’s like a comparison between the original cast of The Real World and the most recent cast. Thinner, more highlighted, more generic. It’s an interesting shorthand for how the beauty ideal has evolved, has seemingly gotten more stringent. (I say this and right away I feel like I’m not being fair to the no-doubt multidimensional cast of The Real World: Brooklyn. I apologize in advance. I am old.)
It is absolutely striking to note how different the young women cast in the roles in the 2008 version of 90210 look than their predecessors in 1990…Notice how the bodies of the 1990s females in the cast are proportioned. They have hips, wider thighs, vaguely pronounced muscles and heads that appear to belong on top of their bodies. By the standards of 1990, these actresses were thin and pretty.
Without the aid of Photoshop (which was released just after the first 90210 episode aired), these young women – old as they looked to audiences at the time – probably would have looked ridiculous decked out in the clothing we see on the stars of the new 90210. They would not have been good for the consumerist, fashion-fetish aspect of the program at all.
I also was struck by the fact that the new mom figure, previously played by Carol Potter, is now being played by Lori Laughlin, who looks much younger and hotter and less mom-like, Full House notwithstanding. So what do you think? Have the beauty ideals changed, and can you think of any more examples of this? Or am I just out of touch with the kids these days?
And incidentally, it’s hard to comprehend that 90210 was so many years ago; how old am I, anyway?
Thanks for the link, Nonk!
Posted by mo pie
Filed under: Sex & Romance, TV
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A major problem with modern American TV (especially the Big Three networks and FOX) is that casting departments always seems to go with what I call the “Generic Hollywood Look.” Ultra-thin white women with straight limp hair, and angular but sultry faces. They all look interchangeable and you can’t tell them apart. They even sound the same.
There’s a bit more variety when it comes to men, despite the feminine pretty boy trend we’ve been seeing, especially on soaps. If you go to YouTube and watch clips of soaps from the 70s and 80s and early 90s compared to today, the men were still good-looking, but they looked more approachable and not as plastic. Many of the women had meat on their bones, and would be considered fat by today’s standards.
So yes, I do think beauty ideals have changed in the over two decades I’ve been a TV viewer. It’s interesting to watch US shows and then watch BBC America and their content. There are quite a few actresses and actors across the pond who probably would not get lead parts in the States because they don’t fit the so-called mold.
My husband and I have been watching The X-Files on DVD from the start for the past two weeks, and I keep noticing how many clothes everyone has on! The only people showing any skin were either dead, wounded, or Duchovny. Even the sexy vampire lady was wearing a suit!
I know the show was considered revolutionary even at the time because the female lead character wasn’t any of the major TV archetypes and never forgot to wear a shirt to work, but she also had an actual butt and completely normal body, where today the skirts would be much shorter, the heels higher, and the body completely different under those Armani suits. (That person would be shaped a lot more like 2007-era Gillian Anderson, as a matter of fact. Makes the difference stand out that much more.)
I’ve been watching reruns of the original 90210, which I hadn’t seen since they originally aired. I’ve actually been wondering if my tv aspect ration was screwed up — the actors all look so round compared with any actors in any current teen drama. Part of it definitely is the clothes — shoulder pads and blousy tops tucked into baggy jeans — but I definitely remember growing up wanting to look like those actresses, like they were the most glamorous beautiful women I could imagine, but now their bodies look out of place on television.
It does seem like the beauty ideal has devolved – to me less tolerance for diversity is a step back from internal or external evolution.
Bree, that reminds me of when they remade the Office. Which obviously I now love, but I remember being appalled at first! John Krasinksi: way too good looking! Jenna Fischer: way too thin!
I’ve definitely noticed this trend with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which only started in 1997. By the later seasons, Sarah Michelle Gellar looked much slimmer than she did at the beginning. Early Buffy had a rounded face and thighs that look chunky to our eyes.
Looking at that old 90210 cast snap, I can only reflect on how far we’ve come. Jeans were horrible back then.
This has been your moment of shallowness. You may now resume sociocultural commentary.
I haven’t been able to peg why Hollywood has the need to cast these skeletons as “beautiful”. The rest of the world, by and large, doesn’t think of them quite that way, and everything I’ve heard, from every direction, suggests they’d be better off casting women with a little more curvature.
I think the article is right on. Product placement is a major motive in television now. I watched the premiere of The Cleaner on A & E, and it was supposedly commercial free. Interestingly enough, all of the named characters were filmed in the same make of car (can’t remember which automobile company was sponsoring the show.)
Fashion is marketed through the shows, now.
And so are breast implants.
The difference in body types really is striking, but mostly I’m bummed to see Jessica Walter playing a 90210 grandma instead of tossing back drinks and being snarky as Lucille Bluth. Guess that makes me shallow too.
I’m laughing my ass off at those high waisted jeans! Oh man.
It is such a shock seeing those 2 photos together. I’m assuming all the actresses in the new cast are size 0, and Jennie Garth was probably a 6 at most, but she looks so bottom heavy (mostly thanks to those jeans, I bet). And probably wouldn’t get work today if she was an 18 year old.
Tori Spelling was damn skinny, and I generally don’t think of her as being well proportioned.
I have to agree with bryneout jeans were pretty horrible and very unflattering!!
Not only is it worrying… where is it going? How can the standards get any more stringent? And yet in 1990 there was already a belief that young women were pressurised to look like “unattainable” images in magazines and on TV. Do we not notice that it’s getting worse? Because it is getting worse.
On a related topic, I’m generally appalled by the way the standards for minimum personal grooming seem to keep rising. I have recently heard other women saying – apparently seriously – that it is “disgusting” not to wax your legs (not shave, wax) and “unhygienic” not to get regular manicures.
I’m sorry. No. Not washing is unhygienic. Relying on a nailbrush and soap and water… isn’t. Choosing not to undergo a painful and expensive procedure to appear as if you don’t have body hair, that also isn’t.
These things are style choices, not an obligation.
I blame Ally McBeal. Before that show, “Hollywood skinny” wasn’t the extreme that it is now. One reason Courtney Thorne-Smith gave for leaving the show is that she started feeing insecure about her body. Courtney Freaking Thorne-Smith felt fat around the likes of Calista Flockhart and Portia DeRossi. Jane Krakowski, who might be all of a size 4, looked HUGE next to Flockhart. Of course, Ally and Nell wore impossibly short suits, that in real life any judge would throw out of a courtroom for being inappropriate to the gravitas of the setting. (Believe me, I’ve seen it done. In 1997, there were still judges who wouldn’t allow women lawyers to appear in the courtrooms in pantsuits, let alone micro-mini skirts.)
I think that it was right about the time that Law and Order started putting it’s ADAs in them, too.
I’ve noticed that the women in Shark disappear if they turn sideways. They’re gorgeous and teeeeeeny tiny. Compare that to, say, Cagney and Lacey, who were pretty and slender by the standards of the day when the show started, were allowed to gain weight without too much crap as they aged, and look enormous compared to the women in today’s cop shows. They’re still gorgeous in my book, but neither would get a lead role in anything these days at the weights they were then.
I can’t really tell the difference. I couldn’t back then, and I still can’t now. I remember a Sassy magazine survey back then that asked guys to compare four different body types (athletic, thin-thin, curvy-thin and a-bit-of-extra-weight) and they all looked the same to me (incidentally, the boys preferred curvy-thin to the other three body types).
It’s just so binary with me. I am fat. They are not. The original cast was thin. So it this one. I do perceive more differences in body types now than I did then (i.e. I am learning to perceive differences amongst the thin) but I can’t see the differences in the 90210 casts. Especially considering the type of clothing on the actresses, as has been mentioned by other posters.
I actually screamed, “Change the channel! Get that girl to eat something!” when I flipped past the season premier of the new 90210. I don’t know her character name but her collar bone is so pronounced! I know people who have trouble keeping weight on (I am NOT one of them) and even they don’t look that skinny.