“TV’s brashest 21-year-old talks revealingly about her wild past, her brief engagement, and ‘people who think I’m a bitch,’” the coverline next to a picture of Shannen Doherty reads on a 1992 issue of People magazine. A year later, on another People cover: “Out of Control! These days, Beverly Hills’ hard-partying, check-bouncing bad girl may be going way too far.”
In the ’90s, before a wave of early aughts tabloids and bloggers like Perez Hilton made a mint lampooning young, female celebrities like Lindsay and Britney and Paris, Shannen Doherty was popular fodder. Drunken nights out, shotgun marriages, fights at the club, court-appointed anger-management classes, and other run-ins with the law were breathlessly chronicled for a celebrity-obsessed public thirsty to see the unraveling of the stars they tuned in to watch every week. Doherty was deemed unhinged, branded a liability. How the media treated her (and Drew Barrymore too, for that matter) was a template for the years to follow, when such cruelty would become ever more commonplace and, with the dawn of social media, ever more accessible. Doherty was branded a bad girl; she was called “difficult,” a notoriously loaded term when lobbed at women.
But for teenage me, those were the very labels that made me fiercely love her. They were labels that Brenda Walsh, the character that arguably made Doherty most famous, had already confronted on-screen. When Beverly Hills, 90210 debuted in 1990, I was in junior high and already deeply familiar with Doherty from her roles as Jenny on Little House on the Prairie, Kris Witherspoon (opposite tween dream Chad Allen) on Our House, and as one of the titular mean girls in the seminal 1980s film Heathers. Brenda Walsh (played by a then 19-year-old Doherty) was introduced to audiences as a wide-eyed girl from Minnesota with a stretchy headband, mousy brown hair, and pastel-hued wardrobe who, along with her goody-two-shoes twin brother, Brandon, had been plopped into the decadence and debauchery of LA. “Nobody knows me here. I could be anybody, I could be somebody,” Brenda says to her brother on the show’s first episode, as she anxiously considers what to wear on her first day at a school in a city that was definitely not Minneapolis. Beverly Hills, 90210 would dive into taboo topics like AIDS, domestic violence, eating disorders, suicide, and drug abuse, becoming a runaway hit for producer Aaron Spelling. All these years later, the show remains the pinnacle of teen drama, and Brenda its queen. (Let’s face it: The seasons after Spelling booted Doherty from the cast could never measure up, even with the addition of Tiffani Thiessen’s chaos-courting Valerie Malone.)