New Shows + Movies by Women — December 4, 2020

“New Shows + Movies by Women” took the November break off, which means we’ll be covering the last two weeks. They were both very full for new work. Let’s briefly tackle the closure of Quibi and two short films on HBO first.

Quibi Closes Shop: Streaming experiment Quibi has officially concluded. Its shut down date was December 1. A few lesser known series debuting toward the end of the streaming service’s run never came out, so it’s difficult to say what exactly Quibi will do with their material. Will it be sold to other streaming services, packaged out, or does it revert to partner studios? It may be some of column A, some of column B.

Quibi did a number of things differently from other subscription services, including how rights to shows were handled, so their closure may look different from other services. If you were a fan of a show or movie there, chances are decent it will pop up somewhere else eventually. It’s hard to say how soon, or how widely its former shows will be strewn across the streaming landscape.

HBO short films: A few new shorts are premiering on HBO Max. I’m finding it’s a pretty good service for short films, both in narrative and documentary form.

First is writer-director Jacqueline Pepall’s “De Blanco la Patuda” (“White is for Virgins”), in which a woman’s disagreement with her mother over her own wedding dress brings out a deeper divide.

Second is writer-director Patricia Vidal Delgado’s “La leyenda negra”, following an undocumented teenager trying to remain in the U.S.

NEW SERIES

Saved by the Bell (Peacock)
showrunner Tracey Wigfield

The “Saved by the Bell” continuation is a surprisingly good series that in many ways acts as a takedown of the original. It picks apart performative allyship by coding the most absurd pranks and schemes of the original as a privilege the wealthy, white students of Bayside continue to enjoy. Meanwhile, the new students from a shuttered low-income school are constantly under suspicion, even when they behave themselves.

That it simultaneously manages to be one of the best comedies of the year is impressive. The show walks a very fine line successfully, with stellar writing, inclusive casting, and some breakout comedy performances, and I reviewed it earlier this week.

“Saved by the Bell” is showrun by Tracey Wigfield, a writer, producer, and actress on “30 Rock”, “The Mindy Project”, and “Great News”.

You can watch the new “Saved by the Bell” with a Peacock subscription. Many cable, satellite, and streaming services already include NBC’s streaming platform, so you may already have it.

Selena: The Series (Netflix)
mostly directed by women

Selena Quintanilla was a superstar who took Tejano music mainstream in the early 90s. She was murdered at 23 by the founder of her fan club, a former friend. “Selena: The Series” depicts her life, and it looks like the first season will tell her story up until her rise to stardom.

A full list of directors isn’t yet available, but the showrunners are on record that the majority of directors are women. There’s also been a focus on hiring Latinas in the writing room. We do know that Hiromi Kamata directs the premiere and finale of the first season. The Japanese-Mexican director has helmed a few Mexican series.

You can watch “Selena: The Series” with a Netflix subscription.

Black Narcissus (Hulu)
directed by Charlotte Bruus Christensen

This is a new adaptation of Rumer Godden’s 1939 novel, previously realized in a 1947 film. A group of nuns attempt to run a convent in the Himalayas. The altitude, weather, and culture clashes all contribute to wearing them down. This also marks one of the final appearances by Diana Rigg before she passed.

All three episodes are written by Amanda Coe and directed by Charlotte Bruus Christensen. This is Christensen’s first major project as director, but there’s a good chance you’ve seen her work as a cinematographer. She was director of photography on “A Quiet Place”, “Molly’s Game”, “Fences”, “Far from the Madding Crowd”, and “The Hunt”, just to name a few.

Coe is an experienced episodic writer, having worked on “Shameless” and “Room at the Top”.

You can watch “Black Narcissus” with a Hulu subscription.

Bhaag Beanie Bhaag (Netflix)
directed by Debbie Rao

An aspiring stand-up comic pursues her dream job despite the disapproval of her parents. Reviews from India have been pretty favorable.

Beware some user brigading on review sites. There’s early upset that the show shares broad similarities to “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”. Apparently only one woman in the entire world has a story to tell about double-standards in the stand-up comedy industry, and having a second woman tell one that takes place 60 years later from the complete other side of the world is too frequent. I’m not sure what the logic is – that women could only possibly face bigotry in the stand-up industry once every 70 years globally? Point is: review brigading would be silly if it wasn’t so damaging, and if you’re interested in this, do what you like, watch it, and be careful about how much credence you lend user reviews on places like IMDB and Metacritic.

“Bhaag Beanie Bhaag” is directed by Debbie Rao. She’s directed on a few Indian series, including the very well received “Better Life Foundation”, “Pushpavalli”, and India’s version of “The Office”.

“Bhaag Beanie Bhaag” is written by Nisha Kalra and Devashree Shivadekar.

You can watch “Bhaag Beanie Bhaag” with a Netflix subscription.

NEW MOVIES

Bombay Rose (Netflix)
directed by Gitanjali Rao

A deaf, orphan boy loses his job. A group of workers whisper about unionizing. An English teacher sets the table for her late husband every night. A Muslim man falls for a Hindu woman, each struggling to make ends meet. A single rose connects a city full of characters in a hand-painted animation that took 60 artists a year-and-a-half to make.

The absolutely awe-inspiring feat was helmed by writer, director, and editor Gitanjali Rao. This is her first feature animation, but her previous shorts “Printed Rainbow” and “TrueLoveStory” have earned praise and awards at Cannes and other festivals. “Bombay Rose” is getting a significant amount of early Oscar buzz.

You can watch “Bombay Rose” with a Netflix subscription.

Happiest Season (Hulu)
directed by Clea DuVall

A woman invites her girlfriend home for Christmas, but she hasn’t yet come out to her family. The pair have to pretend they’re straight and not on the verge of marrying. It may look and sound like a perfunctory holiday movie, but I’ve heard wonderful things about the film from friends and critics I trust.

It helps that the cast for this is stupendous. Kristen Stewart and Mackenzie Davis lead, with Mary Steenburgen and Victor Garber (the parents), Aubrey Plaza, Alison Brie, Dan Levy, Ana Gasteyer, the list goes on and on. It’s a dream comedic cast.

Writer-director Clea DuVall had a surge of projects as an actress in the late 90s and early 2000s, including cult fave “The Faculty”. She’s since starred in “Carnivale”, “Heroes”, “American Horror Story”, and “The Handmaid’s Tale”.

“Happiest Season” is just her second feature as a director after 2016’s “The Intervention”. She’s been able to get absurdly talented ensemble casts in both.

You can watch “Happiest Season” with a Hulu subscription.

Wander (VOD)
directed by April Mullen

A private investigator is hired to research a suspicious death in a small town. He becomes convinced the case relates to his own daughter’s death and that he’s just at the tip of a larger conspiracy. The film is based in part on the theft of indigenous land and disappearance of Indigenous, Black, and people of color.

The cast includes Aaron Eckhart, Tommy Lee Jones, Katheryn Winnick, Heather Graham, Raymond Cruz, and Branden Fehr.

Director April Mullen is an Anishinaabe Algonquin director who’s helmed episodes of “Killjoys”, “Wynonna Earp”, and “Legends of Tomorrow”.

You can rent “Wander” on Amazon, Fandango Now, Google Play, iTunes, or RedBox.

Black Beauty (Disney+)
directed by Ashley Avis

I’m a sucker for “Black Beauty” re-tellings, even if the plot diverges as much as this appears to. The original novel was hugely influential in ending certain practices of animal cruelty, including the abolition of the checkrein, which damaged horses’ necks. It was also a significantly anti-capitalist book that argued in favor of workers’ rights.

This adaptation displaces the story onto a horse rescue ranch in modern times. Look around the comments (always a mistake) and you’ll see a lot of people upset, but the truth is that animal cruelty has changed over the years and that includes the mistreatment of horses and other working animals. There’s every reason to update that animal welfare message to fit today’s problems instead of those of the 1870s. Hopefully, this one does that.

Ashley Avis has written and directed on a range of projects, from the environmental thriller “Deserted” to romantic comedy “The Trouble with Mistletoe”.

You can watch “Black Beauty” with a Disney+ subscription.

She Dies Tomorrow (Hulu)
directed by Amy Seimetz

Amy is certain she’s going to die tomorrow. She tells a friend, who tells her friends, and the idea spreads like a contagion. Increasingly, everyone becomes sure they’re going to die tomorrow.

Writer-director Amy Seimetz is one of the most uniquely experienced people to direct such a unique horror film. Her surreal, retro-hauntology style has served her well writing and directing “Sun Don’t Shine” and directing on “Atlanta”. She also co-created and directed on “The Girlfriend Experience”. She’s played leading roles in “Upstream Color”, “Possession”, “The Killing”, and played Becky Ives on “Stranger Things”.

You can watch “She Dies Tomorrow” with a Hulu subscription (the page doesn’t appear to be up just yet), or see where to rent it via streaming right here.

Christmas on the Square (Netflix)
directed by Debbie Allen

“A Christmas Carol” where Christine Baranski plays Scrooge? I’m sold. And where Dolly Parton plays the angel from “It’s a Wonderful Life”? What!? That doesn’t even – but yes, two tickets please. And legendary choreographer Debbie Allen directs? All the tickets! But it might be a bit camp? Here’s my routing number.

Is it theater, drama, musical, stage show? Who cares? It’s a family Christmas wotsit from some of the most talented women in their industries.

Dolly Parton has been in the news recently for being revealed as a producer of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”, for paying women producers out of her own pocket when they weren’t paid an equal amount to their male counterparts, and for helping to fund the development of a COVID vaccine.

This isn’t exactly anything new. She also established the Imagination Library, which provides free books to children worldwide. She set up the kind of monthly stimulus Mitch McConnell and the Senate can’t even manage for a national pandemic after people in Tennessee lost their homes to wildfires in 2016. The list goes on. I’m loath to believe in heroes as anything more than a storytelling construct, but consistently good people? They’re real.

Director Debbie Allen might be best known for her role as Dr. Catherine Fox in “Grey’s Anatomy”, but what you might not know is she’s directed 26 of the show’s episodes. She was also a prolific director on “Fame”, “All of Us”, “Everybody Hates Chris”. She directed more than half of the episodes of “A Different World”, and multiple episodes on “The Fresh Prince of Bel Air”, “Scandal”, “Family Ties”, “That’s So Raven”. She’s choreographed extensively for TV, including multiple Academy Awards dance numbers. She’s one of the most influential directors in television history, though she’s rarely mentioned in that conversation.

You can watch “Christmas on the Square” with a Netflix subscription.

Rust Creek (Netflix)
directed by Jen McGowan

A woman is kidnapped in rural Kentucky. What follows is a harrowing chase through the elements, and an alliance with a man she can’t trust.

Director Jen McGowan has helmed episodes of the new “Twilight Zone” and “Purge” series. This is her second feature.

You can watch “Rust Creek” with a Netflix subscription, or see where to rent it via streaming right here.

Disco (VOD)
directed by Jorunn Myklebust Syversen

A Norwegian dancer has a professional setback. She’s the stepdaughter of an evangelical pastor, so she looks for answers in religion. Becoming convinced she’s getting punished for her lifestyle, she attaches herself to a radical conservative sect.

This is the second feature from writer-director Jorunn Myklebust Syversen.

See where to rent “Disco” via streaming right here.

Finding Agnes (Netflix)
directed by Marla Ancheta

“Finding Agnes” follows a man who’s mother left him as a child 25 years ago. She’s living in Morocco, with an adopted daughter. She asks him to visit after their long estrangement, so she can explain her actions and reconnect with him.

This is the first film from director Marla Ancheta. Netflix has recently done well in licensing and even premiering Filipino films for its platform.

You can watch “Finding Agnes” with a Netflix subscription.

Godmothered (Disney+)
directed by Sharon Maguire

In an age when fairy godmothers are no longer needed, an idealistic young fairy godmother sets out to help one little girl. It’s just that by the time she gets there, the little girl is all grown up and doesn’t need her help.

Director Sharon Maguire is best known for helming “Bridget Jones’s Diary” and “Bridget Jones’s Baby”.

You can watch “Godmothered” with a Disney+ subscription.

Fierce (Netflix)
directed by Anna Wieczur-Bluszcz

Auditions are taking place for a “Voice” style reality show competition in Poland. One girl chides a judge who’s rude to her mother. It makes for good TV, and she’s pushed through to the next stage of the competition. There’s more to it, though – the show’s judge is also the father who abandoned her family.

Anna Wieczur-Bluszcz directs in Polish TV and film.

You can watch “Fierce” on Netflix with a subscription.

I Hate New Year’s (VOD)
directed by Christin Baker

A rising star is overdue for her new album, but she’s experiencing writer’s block. She goes home to Nashville with her best friend and seeks out an old flame for closure.

Christin Baker has directed on a range of series and movies. She’s the founder of Tello Films, the production company behind “I Hate New Year’s”. Tello creates content that centers on LGBTQ experiences, with a particular focus on lesbian stories and characters.

You can rent “I Hate New Year’s” on Amazon or Google Play.

Getting to Know You (VOD)
directed by Joan Carr-Wiggin

A drunken ex stalks a man to the hotel he’s staying at. He asks a stranger to pretend to be his wife so that she’ll go away. The two strangers start to fall for each other, but his ex and her husband keep getting in the way.

Joan Carr-Wiggin has written and directed a number of romantic comedies, but rarely about teens or young adults. Instead, she tends to focus on middle-aged and older performers examining if they’re happy in their present situation.

See where to rent “Getting to Know You” right here.

Take a look at new shows + movies by women from past weeks.

If you enjoy what you read on this site, consider subscribing to Gabriel Valdez’s Patreon. It helps with the time and resources to continue writing articles like this one.

“Saved By the Bell” — The New Caste

The new “Saved by the Bell” is hilarious and…important? Wait, that can’t be right. They made a continuation of “Saved by the Bell” and gave it a meaningful purpose? That’s not respectful of the original at all!

Truth be told, it’s even a disappointment. I try my best not to go into a new show with preconceptions, but I really did think this would be a shambling corpse of walking nostalgia that only existed for the cash-in. I was looking forward to tearing it apart and writing jokes the whole time instead of ugh, doing analysis. When I watched it, a horrific realization dawned upon me: this is really good.

Despite what the name would have you believe, this isn’t a sequel to “Saved by the Bell”. This is the sequel to “Zack Morris is Trash”. If you don’t know “Zack Morris is Trash”, it’s a YouTube series produced by Funny or Die. It cuts together episodes of the original “Saved by the Bell” with a voiceover to highlight what an ableist, racist, misogynist sociopath Zack Morris is. It highlights just how weird it was that an entire generation looked up to him as an example of cultural cool, and it’s funny as hell to boot.

The Original Players

For a reason that still eludes me, the original “Saved by the Bell” holds a dear place in my heart. A lot of early Millennials feel that way. It’s deeply problematic, but its cheesiness was endearing and it was one of the cultural touchstones of just about any Millennial’s childhood. It featured one of the only positive Latino protagonists in 90s television, the complicated jock A.C. Slater. Yet the show was also incredibly problematic. Women were prizes to be competed over and Zack’s sociopathic manipulation was the core of the comedy. It was treated as admirable.

Sure, Zack would get his comeuppance once in a while, but the lessons learned by the end of the episode were half-hearted. Episodic TV being what it was in the 90s, those lessons never made Zack think twice about his next manipulative scheme in the next episode. Thankfully, the 2020 continuation is keenly aware of this.

The new series is a full-throated takedown of the original. It recognizes just how self-absorbed and wrong-headed it was, and it walks a pretty difficult comedic line of using this to talk about privilege and performative allyship. Let’s back up.

It starts with a Zack Morris narration of what’s happened since the 90s. He got a parking ticket one day and tried to get out of it with one of his overcomplicated plans that goes too far, and gets him elected governor of California. Sounds unbelievable until, you know…[gestures at the United States since 2016].

Zack clearly has no idea what he’s doing in the position, and immediately tanks the public education system. Desperately trying to recover, he ends up agreeing for students in low-income areas to attend schools in high-income areas. This is just the set-up, covered in the first three minutes of the first episode. The premise smashes together leads from an underfunded school with Bayside’s rich, privileged preppies – including Zack’s son Mac.

The original cast shows up to varying degrees, but is generally kept to the supporting players. Zack and Kelly, now married, exist around the fringes and only enter into the picture once everyone else is established. A.C. Slater and Jessie Spano are now staff at Bayside. Slater is the athletic director, though he spends most of his time bragging about – and sometimes trying to re-live – his glory days. Spano is somewhat more successful. She’s a published author with a PhD, and the school’s guidance counselor. Her own son goes to Bayside, though she coddles him tremendously.

Slater is exemplary of the show’s perspective on the original. It was nice and all, but looking back on it with rose-colored nostalgia is out-of-place and keeps him from being able to move forward. In one scene, he starts to give the Morris and Spano boys a lesson about toxic masculinity, only to turn it into an opportunity to brag about how he slept with both their moms in high school. Of course, this backfires when the boys both realize they wouldn’t exist if each woman hadn’t dumped Slater.

It’s difficult to both humanize and lampoon such self-absorbed characters – usually a show has to lean one way or another. “Saved by the Bell” does an incredibly good job of balancing that line, and that’s useful. It’s not interested in showing us the privilege that’s obvious. It goes further into picking apart the privilege that otherwise decent-ish people reinforce every day.

It’s also hypercritical of the nostalgia that is shown to the original, partly as a criticism of the problems nostalgia allows to continue in general. That’s a weird thing for a show that only exists because of that nostalgia, but give it a chance and it works.

Privilege and Performative Allyship

Every show needs a reason to exist, though, and that’s not enough of one. No, what this continuation makes its comedic bread and butter is something far more modern: performative allyship.

Due to redlining, most of the incoming students from the shuttered Douglas High School are Hispanic and Black. Bayside is largely white. One father worries that Douglas might introduce a wave of crime. The principal points out that this father was just indicted on financial fraud. But that’s different, he insists.

Neither is Bayside entirely close-minded; they’re just privileged as all hell. While some parents fear an influx of crime, others establish a group to help: Parents for the Integration of Teachers and Youth, or P.I.T.Y. They hand out extra supplies. The new students need access to the same technology as their wealthy peers. They need books. They need basic supplies, access to copiers and printers. P.I.T.Y. gives them toothbrushes and pregnancy tests.

When iPads go missing in an episode, it’s only the Douglas kids who are suspected of theft, and every Douglas student is treated as secretly knowing who must’ve done it. The Bayside kids distrust the Douglas kids because of this, yet they simultaneously admire that none of them will narc on each other – even if every layer of the situation is only based on the fantasy the Bayside students and staff have envisioned.

“Saved by the Bell” isn’t tackling direct, explicit racism. It’s tackling systemic racism and how privilege performs allyship while simultaneously reinforcing the structures that maintain racism. It’s a lot more than I would’ve ever expected a “Saved by the Bell” continuation to do.

That’s the why of “Saved by the Bell”, but what’s the how? Its comedy needs to be good. Jokes need to land while tackling complex subject matter. And here, they do. The writing is light years ahead of what the original ever did, and it creates a show that would feel completely different if not for the thread of absurdism that keeps the two tied together.

The flavor of Bayside is set early on. The lead is former Douglas student Daisy, played by Haskiri Velazquez. She arrives with that Zack Morris ability to freeze time and talk to the audience. The first thing she hears on entering Bayside is Mac and it-girl Lexi arguing about a parking space. Lexi got it because Mac showed up late one day. Mac’s excuse? “You drugged my toothpaste and I woke up at Six Flags”.

The comedy is surprisingly quick, with quips like this arriving lightning fast. The pace and quality of the dialogue is reminiscent of a modern classic like “Mean Girls”. There’s a joy in how smart some of its daftness is.

Absurdism as Double-Standard

The pranks and schemes of Zack’s time have now become the Bayside way, and it captures the double-standard at play perfectly. The rich, white students can break the law, steal, drug each other, skip class, not do work, and still progress. True to the absurdism of his father Zack’s original 90s pranks, Mac floods the gymnasium (again), attaches wheels to a student’s desk to literally drive him away from a girl they’re competing over, gets a book banned so he doesn’t have to write a report on it, and never gets punished.

Meanwhile, the Hispanic and Black students from Douglas can do everything right and still be suspected of any little thing that goes wrong. They’re regularly accused of things they never did, and if they step out of line by the slightest margin, white parents descend with demands of over-the-top disciplinarian action.

That those authorities are an ineffectual principal beholden to wealthy parents, and well-meaning but self-absorbed staff like Slater and Spano doesn’t help. These kids are often left to fight systems stacked against them while the people in charge of those systems bumble and act more powerless than they are. Even when Mac and Lexi attempt to help, half the time it’s a misguided performance at it and someone like Daisy has to explain to them how they’re making it about themselves rather than the student of color being persecuted.

The comedy is made more about these wrongheaded attempts at allyship and the broken systems themselves. It’s rarely at the expense of the Douglas students like Daisy, best friend Aisha, or the enigmatic Devante, except when they feel out of sorts and try to act white or act rich and see it backfire on them in ways that don’t happen to Mac or Lexi.

That Mac and Lexi are themselves essentially kids figuring things out, who want to help but have been taught the most privileged ways to publicly perform that help to an admiring audience…it humanizes them as well. They’re not necessarily sociopaths, they’re just doing what everyone around them celebrates and admires them for doing. The culture they’re trying to succeed within is what’s sociopathic.

The Bayside kids aren’t awful human beings. This is just the way they think the world works. They’re not conservative bigots (although some of their parents are). They’re progressive and liberal allies who are happy to traffic in allyship so long as it ultimately serves them, because how else would the world work?

It’s what they know, and there’s something of a generational divide between how they struggle with whether that’s right in their formative years vs. the original cast’s self-obsessed characters. It’s a series of fine lines to ride and, somehow, “Saved by the Bell” does it well.

There are a lot of progressive elements in place at Bayside. The Kelly role of the cheerleader everyone admires, wants attention from, and the whole school wants to date? That’s Lexi, who’s trans and played by trans actress Josie Totah. Her story isn’t defined by that alone, as it would be in many shows. In fact, it’s mentioned once and then not even brought up again for several episodes. She’s not the impressionable mark to Zack’s con-man that Kelly was, either. She’s Mac’s superior in schemes and plots. She’s a theater kid who looks out for the other theater kids. She’s full of herself (“Anne Hathaway once called me ‘a lot’”) and takes rejection hard.

Her friends accept her without question, but since her transition, she’s also happy. She feels more herself than ever before, except now she’s happy and that’s the one thing she’s learning how to be. Within all the absurdism of the show, it’s beautiful representation. She’s a full character. It’s of note that Totah only agreed to do the series if she got to produce and ensure that her character would be more than just token representation.

And frankly it’s a nice F.U. to the last four years that a resurrection of a sociopathic cultural touchstone of privilege directly criticizes that privilege, teaches about the damage of performative allyship, and is largely led by three Latines, a Black man, and a trans woman of Arab ancestry.

It’s still easy to appreciate the schemes and pranks just like in the original. We laugh at how absurd they are, and then we recognize the double-standard they traffic in. It’s not hypocritical, it’s how systemic racism works. Racism is (or at least should be) easily recognized in its most absurd and blatant forms. It’s when that racism is folded into a culture that well-meaning, full, complex people will still practice, benefit from, and propagate elements of it in subtle and indirect ways. “Saved by the Bell” features a bunch of likable but naive kids who are only just now confronted about their privilege because they’re only just now having daily conversations and interactions with peers of color.

There are Some Weaknesses

It’s a shockingly ambitious show on that front. That doesn’t mean it succeeds every second. I’d say it gets 90% of the way there, but that’s much further than most shows even think to try. Sure, a joke falls flat now and then, but the themes rarely do. “Saved by the Bell” might be the biggest surprise of the year for me. There are other coming-of-age shows this year I’d call better – “Never Have I Ever” shares some absurdist elements, tackles racism, and is a resoundingly emotional experience. “Teenage Bounty Hunters” might be the most successful comedy out-of-the-gate in years. But “Saved by the Bell” does a lot of work no one would have expected it to do. It mostly does it very well. It’s a rare combination that calls out the dangerous components of cultural nostalgia and performative allyship, while being consistently funny through extremely well-written dialogue and some absurd situations.

If there’s a weakness to the show, it’s that the visual feel can fluctuate. Sometimes the show is shot in a more cinematic, one-camera style, with the dialogue hitting quick in walk-and-talks. Sometimes it’s shot from a medium-visual range that’s suggestive of four-camera sitcom set-ups. It feels like these are most often used for the Gen X and older characters, so it may be a conscious choice – presenting the older generation with some of their generation’s shooting style, while Gen Z gets the more modern Steadicam treatment.

It may also be practical – the Gen X characters have blocks of unbroken dialogue, often in their offices. That lends itself to medium shots of different spaces and editing by dialogue. The Gen Z characters have much more dialogue, but they trade it back and forth more quickly – it makes sense to have two of them in a longer shot rather than edit back and forth every sentence. It does assist in making the adults feel more out-of-touch – even their cinematography is dated.

The visual shift is usually subtle and I think in general it’s an interesting choice that helps the comedy, but every once in a while it can shift tone too much from one space to the next. It introduces a touch too much sitcom flare to the visuals. These moments are brief but can be jarring. I like the idea a lot; the visual transition between shooting styles themselves just needs to feel smoother.

All in all, this is so much better than I thought it would (or ever could be). It’s exceedingly funny and the jokes come in barrages, so even when something falls flat there’s another right on its heels that works. Performances like Velazquez’s and Totah’s in particular carry the show, and it’s strongest when it mostly backseats the original cast and focuses on the kids.

There’s a stretch of episodes in the second half that give the adults the A-plots and…they just don’t feel as important. That’s the weird thing – the comedy works, but it’s the show’s relevance that makes it feel unique. “Saved by the Bell” is, for the first time in the franchise’s history, deserving of its importance. That might be the strangest sentence I’ve written in 2020.

You can watch the new “Saved by the Bell” on Peacock, which is available free with ads, and already included in many cable and satellite packages.

If you enjoy what you read on this site, consider subscribing to Gabriel Valdez’s Patreon. It helps with the time and resources to continue writing articles like this one.

10 Things I Thought While Watching “The Unauthorized Saved by the Bell Story”

by Gabriel Valdez

I mean, aside from “Why am I doing this?” and “Who else could bring us this magic but Lifetime?”

Yeah, it’s bad, but I knew that coming in. Why is it bad, though? Bad movies can be awful in so many different ways. What special route does The Unauthorized Saved by the Bell Story take?

1. It’s occasionally narrated by Sam Kindseth’s Dustin Diamond, who played Screech. It’s all based on Diamond’s tell-all book Behind the Bell. I hope you’ll forgive me that I’ve never read it. Certainly, if you’ve read it, I probably won’t forgive you.

It’s a smart move on paper, since Diamond had the most tumultuous post-Saved by the Bell career, involving drugs and a porn appearance. Kindseth sells us Diamond, more or less, but during the film-within-a-film re-enactments of specific Saved by the Bell episodes, he falls very short of emulating Screech. This is actually where most of the actors fail. We’re willing to buy into the idea that they’re believably embodying the real-life actors they’re meant to portray. Yet they rarely feel up to the task of delivering on the specific character roles in Saved by the Bell. That disconnect is pretty crucial, and is the single biggest weakness in most behind-the-scenes bios about actors.

2. Dylan Everett does a pretty solid baby Mark-Paul Gosselaar, but Gosselaar filled out across the show more than any other cast member. Make-up and costume do a solid job of making the rest of the cast mature, but a bit of darker hair color is all Zack gets. He looks more and more like the baby of the cast, which doesn’t fit reality or the direction the plot takes regarding his developing into a leader. His lack of aging feels very off, especially when it’s so correctable through make-up and costume. You can’t make an actor taller, but you can have him stand on off-screen platforms, or stick lifts in his shoes.

3. Alyssa Lynch plays Tiffany Thiessen, who played Kelly on Saved by the Bell. She looks very little like Thiessen, and acts even less like her. If you’re making a Saved by the Bell biopic, your Zack and Kelly ought to be compelling in some way. Everett’s vaguely solid, but Lynch is a plain miss. It’s not her fault; she’d be fine in any number of other projects. You have to lay most of the blame on casting and the sheer lack of energetic directing.

4. The ones that work: Taylor Russell does a pretty good Lark Voorhies, who played Lisa. She gets the syncopation of Lisa’s voice and her weird stances down, while showing some range in the behind-the-scenes muckety-muck.

5. If this whole thing were about Mario Lopez (who played A.C. Slater), Julian Works wouldn’t pull it off. In short bursts of story, though, Works embellishes on the actor’s easy charm and self-confident air. He’s well implemented as flavor for the rest of the story.

6. Tiera Skovbye. That’s where this whole thing’s at. She doesn’t look all that much like Elizabeth Berkley, who played Jessie, but man does she seem like Elizabeth Berkley. That’s what we call the Oliver Stone effect – to seem so much like a real person that you can convince an audience you look exactly like them, even when you clearly don’t.

Skovbye nails a re-enactment of the famous “caffeine pills” scene in which Saved by the Bell addressed drug addiction. Looking back at that scene, I can see how it gave kids pause and why it became important. In the best decision this movie makes (and there aren’t many), they don’t show us Skovbye re-enacting Berkley’s scene during filming, but rather rehearsing it in front of her fellow cast. This allows her to play the scene slightly differently, and Skovbye nails it in a way that gives you real, momentary hope for the film as a whole. Most of these cast members are just emulating real-life actors. Skovbye’s the only one owning her role and making it into something new.

7. So if you’re going to rank this thing in terms of “feels like a real person,” you go with Skovbye’s Berkley, you wait a bit so that everyone understands what a giant gap there is between her and the other actors, and then you list Works’s Lopez, Russell’s Voorhies, Everett’s Gosselaar, Kindseth’s Diamond, and then finally Lynch’s Thiessen. It’s weird then that the movie focuses on Everett, Kindseth, and Lynch. Yeah, there’s a script to follow, but for something as wooden as this, you’ve got to create opportunities for the actors who really nail their characters: Skovbye, Works, and Russell. The filmmaking behind this is by-the-numbers as can be, however. That’s a critic’s polite way of saying it’s unbelievably lazy. I think Unauthorized realizes what it has in certain actors and doesn’t have in others. It just couldn’t care less.

8. Among other things, I learned that Mark-Paul Gosselaar is a quarter Indonesian. This is what I mean when I talk about not judging an actor’s ethnicity unless you’ve truly done your research. (I’ve fact-checked this and, yes, he is.) In my mind, Gosselaar was only ever Caucasian. Never assume when writing or commenting on an actor’s ethnicity. Always do your research.

9. On a long list of glaring mistakes: After Thiessen and Berkley quit the show – I’d say it’s a piece of backstory I was never aware of, but that’s true for the whole thing – they spot their replacement as they leave the set. This would be Leanna Creel, who played biker Tori.

I realize you don’t want to pay for another starring role, and Creel only appeared during the last season…but having two actresses point at someone off-screen and talk about her for a scene while never showing us who they’re looking at screams out, “We’re being super-lazy here, folks. In fact, we just don’t care about our audience by this point because you’ve already watched 90% of the ads.”

If it’s budgetary (it’s not), there are a number of crowd scenes. Certainly, you can cut one extra out, fit a curly wig and leather jacket on her, and have her dress like Creel. I’m sure most people watching this (especially after two hours of it) are fans who remember the show fondly. A single cutaway to an actress playing Creel, speaking silently to a PA, wouldn’t have cost much (or anything), and is the kind of fan service for which a project like this exists. Failing to include Creel isn’t a mistake on its own, but centering a scene in which two characters talk about her from across the room while never showing her? That’s representative of the amount of effort put into this whole, shoddy project.

10. So how would I make a Saved by the Bell expose? I’m glad you asked. Let’s get the obvious out of the way. First off, I’d reveal something worth calling this mess an expose. We hear about the actors’ bad behavior after the fact, but we never get to see it. This causes quite a few scenes of high-drama scolding. Ooh, glad I stayed up to watch infant Zack (I’m beginning to think Everett is a real-life Benjamin Button) get yelled at!

Honestly, Saved by the Bell took more risks than its expose ever does. There either isn’t enough material in the show’s backstory to create a compelling two hours, or Lifetime didn’t want to upset fans by using it. Alternately, if you’d centered this on one character, like Diamond, and really pushed home his coming-of-age story, you could make something. Unauthorized makes empty gestures toward that, but it hardly cares enough to find a way to make it work.

Or you could have made this whole thing less of an expose and more about fan service, re-enacting more famous scenes and pushing the glossy side of the actors’ lives. If it’s not about schadenfreude, make it about nostalgia. It wouldn’t have made the movie better, but it could have made it more fun, and “watchable” would be a monumental improvement. This was never the script and hardly the cast to do that, but it is an alternate option should anyone ever seek to tell this non-story again.

But how would I do it? I’d David Lynch the bejesus out of it, that’s how. It wouldn’t be a Lifetime movie then, but who cares? The whole thing already has a film-within-a-film element going, and when faced with a cast that’s pretty incapable of performing, you’re guaranteed something worthwhile just by screwing with them. When are they acting? Are you Zack right now? Are you Mark-Paul Gosselaar? Are you Dylan Everett being fitted for the Tiffany Thiessen wardrobe? Why are there miniature Germans running around in dumpster trash? BECAUSE I’M DAVID LYNCH, THAT’S WHY!

Are the mobs of people outside the studio here for you, or are they – like you – just a figment of Mr. Belding’s imagination? As is all the world. Best of all, you stick a neon pink frame around it and use cheap, shimmery dream effects for the fade-out, and you pretty much have a Saved by the Bell episode right there.

Look, maybe it was late and The Unauthorized Saved by the Bell Story was the most interminable piece of dreck I’ve seen this year (and I’ve watched The Strain), but I’m confident a little Twin Peaks storyline mixed with cotton candy editing could have livened this wreck up. Either that or give it to the guy who did Sharknado.

The Unauthorized Saved by the Bell Story comes out on DVD/Blu-ray on November 3, brought to you by Lionsgate. So that’s what they’re doing with all that Saw money. Prepare your best drinking games, America, for this is the very reason they exist.

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