in the 90s you suddenly had shows that were aiming at a young audience. one of the things that really made 90210 stand out is it was one of the first dramas to really get into the teenager s point of view. do you have protection? of course. it s always been my problem. lots of protection but no one to protect. i wanted to do a tv series that was going to be relevant to teenagers. and it s not about the parents solving the kids problems. it s about the kids basically solving their own problems. what are we supposed to do, sit him down and have a kid-to-parent talk? no, you can t talk to parents on that mature level. tragic but true. if the 60s had beatle mania, the 90s had 90210 mania.
life except rather than just feeling like hell, it actually was hell. her high school was literally built on top of hell. and so all of these creatures would come up that she would have to fight. three in one night. it was a brilliant metaphor for adolescence and all the demons that you have to slay. you know, buffy was a teenager, and she was still finding out who she was. one of the storylines that was very popular and much talked about was where she has sex with her boyfriend for the first time, and then in sort of the world of buffy, he becomes literally evil. there must be part of you inside that still remembers who you are. dream on, schoolgirl. in order to save the world, literally, she knows she has to send him to hell.
fear, hatred, loneliness are more real to me than a shank. it was jaw dropingly violent. it was a men s prison. it probably should be. but you know, it kind of announces the idea that hbo is going to get serious about doing scripted dramas. it s finished! it s over! but hbo really in my mind comes to its own in 1999 with the sopranos. woke this morning, got yourself a gun it s just one of those shows that was a benchmark that changed a lot of things for everybody. throw out the handbook. tony soprano, the lead actor in a drama, he killed a man. we watched him.
i would go to alt.tv/x-files. and people were so nuts for this show. it s just pure science fiction. that s probably what i like most about it. the x-files changed the way people watched television. you could sense these successful creators trying to see how they could do things different five or ten years ago. sometimes that led to really challenging network television that was cool and fun to watch. and sometimes it just seemed to fall off the edge a little bit. let s be careful out there at the time, steven bochco was a very successful producer of hour dramas and wanted to try something brand-new. we re the police! we have a warrant for your arrest! so his idea was to combine a gritty cop show with a broadway musical. i saw one in which a bunch of gang bangers were in jail.
you couldn t talk about public service. it was, what are the ratings going to be? what are the demographics going to be? what is the profit going to be? well, sensationalism sells. in a plea bargain, 18-year-old amy fisher got up to 15 years in prison for shooting the wife of her alleged lover. so intense is the interest in this case that there are three, three made for tv-movies now in the works about it. you make money off sex. you make money off death. you make money off crime. the press calls the case the beverly hills mansion murders. and the story reads like one of the unsold scripts that circulate here in hollywood. we enter into the world of the television news soap opera. a story of basic instincts, anger and fear. i was scared, and i just wanted him to leave me alone. and so, broadcast journalism loses its purity and becomes much more shoddy, sensationalistic. then it all comes together with