“Beverly Hills, 90210” star Ian Ziering is re-teaming with his castmates for Fox’s meta-revival series nearly 20 years after the original went off the air, but the actor had less than kind words for the last attempt at a reboot, The CW’s “90210” series from 2008.
“That show that you saw however many years ago wasn’t really an iteration,” Ziering said at the Television Critics Association press tour on Wednesday. “They were using ‘Beverly Hills, 90210’ to rope people in, [but] once I saw that pilot episode, I realized it had nothing to do with what we had created.”
A number of the original cast members made brief guest appearances in the first season to help launch the CW remake, but Ziering never appeared on the show. He described the remake, co-created by “Veronica Mars” boss Rob Thomas, as “more of a soap opera, where the original was much more substantive, much more issue oriented.”
“I think people related to our show much more because of that,” he said. “We were on for 10 years, they were on for five. Which is a success, but no one’s going to make a remake of that show, with all do respect. Often imitated but never duplicated.”
The new six-episode Fox series centers on the original cast — Gabrielle Carteris, Shannen Doherty, Jennie Garth, Brian Austin Green, Jason Priestley, Tori Spelling and Ian Ziering — playing fictionalized versions of themselves “with a healthy dose of irreverence” as they try to get a revival of their old show off the ground.
Ziering credited Garth and Spelling — who are also credited as co-creators and executive producers — for convincing him and the rest of the original cast to return.
“The time was right,” he said. “We’ve been asked to do this show for the last 19 years. Finally, these ladies had the wherewithal to put it all together and still had the relationships with us to make it happen.”