Peacock’s reboot of Saved by the Bell is barely eight minutes old when we realize it’s operating on a higher level than the original. “I read a Facebook article about an underground sex cult where the kids snort Baby Yoda and worship the YouTube demon Momo,” a blond Bayside mom tells the school principal during a board meeting, spouting rhetoric that would fit snugly within the confines of QAnon. “What are you going to do about this?”
When Zack Morris, Kelly Kapowski, A.C. Slater, and Jessie Spano were roaming the halls of Bayside High, the series wouldn’t have dared attempt such a political zinger. But the opportunity to infuse modern comedy into the original show’s artificial constructs is exactly what drew lifelong fan Tracey Wigfield to reboot Saved by the Bell in the first place.
“Saved by the Bell is my Star Wars. I was so into it as a kid. If there was any other show, I think I would not want to do a reboot right now,” Wigfield, a writer on 30 Rock and The Mindy Project and the creator of Great News, told Vanity Fair. “It was important to me that, if I was going to do a reboot, that it wasn’t just making more episodes of kind of the same thing, with the same tone, mostly because they’ve done that already.”
Her Saved by the Bell reboot should appeal not only to older millennials fluent in Zack Morris—though of course, they’ll like it too. (“Everyone thinks Fleabag was so good and sophisticated” for breaking the fourth wall, joked Wigfield. “It’s like, it’s just Zack Morris.”) The refashioned series casts Zack (Mark-Paul Gosselaar) as the governor of California, with Kelly (Tiffani Thiessen) as his first lady, and Slater (Mario Lopez) and Jessie (Elizabeth Berkley Lauren) working at Bayside High, a school that’s practically frozen in 1993. After Zack cuts funding to California public schools, he’s forced to reassign students from lower-income neighborhoods into affluent suburbs. Newcomers Haskiri Velazquez and Alycia Pascual-Peña are among the students who matriculate to Bayside, where they rub shoulders with Zack’s spoiled son (Mitchell Hoog), Jessie’s daft child (Belmont Cameli), and a budding reality star, Lexi (Josie Totah, who absolutely steals every scene she’s in).
The new Saved by the Bell is a delicate balancing act—one that works surprisingly well. “It was important to me, just creatively, to be able to have them in the show here and there and get jokes out of them, while at the same time not making the show just a bunch of inside jokes and, ‘Hey, remember this thing?’” Wigfield said. Her focus, she explained, was making sure the young cast remained the reboot’s core. “I think if you just do a thing that’s really a reunion and kind of all based in Easter eggs about the old show and nostalgia, that feels to me like a one-off that you kind of can only do one time.”
Besides, putting an emphasis on the next generation allows the show to interrogate a number of issues facing real teenagers, including systemic racism and gender identity. Wigfield, who often took the temperature of her young cast on set to make sure the material was faithful to their experiences, said her background working on network television helped keep the show universal in its message.
“In terms of dealing with issues, it’s a comedy show, and in everything I’ve ever written, the most important thing is that it’s funny, number one,” she said. “It’s not a trenchant David Simon drama, looking to solve education in any way. But it was important to me to assemble a really diverse group of writers, who also come from a bunch of different backgrounds and went to a bunch of different kinds of high schools and grew up in a bunch of different places. And, I feel like that was really helpful in being able to tell subtler stories that do touch on things like class, privilege, and race.”
Lopez and Berkley Lauren are main cast members, while Gosselaar, Thiessen, and original Lisa Turtle actor Lark Voorhies make guest appearances on the show. But despite the cast and the perfect recreations of the show’s original set, one thing that didn’t carry over from the previous version is its delightfully ’90s theme song. For the reboot, a new version was recorded by Lil Yachty.