Confessions Of A 90s VJ

August 12, 2025

This time, Dave is bringing us back to the world of 90s Television and giving us some hard truths about what we’ve learned from our favorite shows. 

If you were anything like me in the 1990s, you spent a good amount of time on the sofa in front of the television. To the untrained (or parental) eye, this would have looked like loafing. But you and I know better: all that time spent in the glow of the tube was worthwhile, and not just because we were collecting tidbits that would make us formidable pub trivia competitors. We were also gathering critical life lessons. We weren’t loafing, we were learning. As we prepare to gather and celebrate all things 90s on the Gulf of Mexico next January, let’s acknowledge and celebrate a few of the important things we learned from 90s television.

Toward the end of Beverly Hills 90210 ’s third season, Tori Spelling’s sweet, silly Donna Martin served herself too much champagne on an empty stomach at the pre-prom, ending up ka-slammered mid-prom, and in a heap of trouble post-prom. The cruel and faceless administrators at West Beverly High were going to withhold her diploma, which would have been especially insulting given that the whole 9-0 gang had already done junior year twice. But her friends rallied around her with a chant that was simple and effective: “Donna Martin graduates.” Not “Let Donna Martin graduate,” mind you; they phrased a wish as a foregone conclusion, an event that not only can’t be stopped, it’s already happened. It may be the first recorded deployment of The Secret. It worked, but boy was it a tense couple of episodes. Tori Spelling’s status as a fictional high school graduate was the cause around which Generation X really rallied, and I’m just now realizing that this might be why there are so few of us in Congress.

Success can be a prison. If you’re lucky enough to write for a television show, and that show ends up clicking with an audience, you’re on top of the world. But if that show is a situation comedy, you may soon find that you have run out of situations. That’s why if a 90s sitcom had young characters, and reached its fourth season, inevitably at least one of those young characters would turn out to be in a band. Zack Attack on Saved By The Bell. Chicks with Attitudes on Step By Step. Jennifer’s band The Permanent Waves on Family Ties (technically the 80s, but because she is mentioned in Swingers, Tina Yothers is canonically 90s). They wouldn’t start a band; no, they would have been in this band for a while now. Long enough to have written original songs, to have booked high-pressure gigs, to have mastered the instrument you had never seen in their room.

Oh sure, we think of Murder She Wrote as more of an 80s phenomenon, but that show ran all the way up to 1996. Eleven seasons, and bear in mind that’s eleven seasons of network television, when studios were on the hook to crank out 26 episodes a year. I’m not great at math, but my preliminary estimates say that’s tens of thousands of murder victims piling up in charming coastal towns, all heralded by the arrival of Angela Lansbury’s sweet busybody Jessica Fletcher. Where Lansbury went, murder was sure to follow. She was a real geriatric Neve Campbell, when you think of it, and you know she would have had Skeet Ulrich and Matthew Lillard figured out long before Rose McGowan got munched by the garage door. (Apologies to anyone on The 90s Cruise mailing list who has somehow not seen Scream.)

Our country has exported some great stuff to the rest of the world: democracy, jazz, sports-utility vehicles that don’t fit on European roads. But in the 90s, if you were traveling abroad and you told someone you were American, the word you would hear back from them more often than any other was “BAYWATCH!” The David Hasselhoff lifeguard vehicle ran for one subpar season on NBC in 1989, but after its cancellation it was resurrected in syndication and became a global sensation. More than a billion viewers all around the globe watched the slow-motion beach rescues of Yasmine Bleeth, David Chokachi, Mitzi Kapture, and other actors whose names future generations will swear I made up. Baywatch was a guilty pleasure in its home country, a standard pleasure elsewhere, and a purely 90s phenomenon.

Whether you were surrounded by thousands of your fellow high school students like the 90210 kids, or amid the bustling and sexy sprawl of an overpopulated Los Angeles like their older counterparts on Melrose Place, you had a clique of about a half-dozen, and that was your life. 90s television taught us to approach life like it’s the first day of the school year in the high school cafeteria: choose your table carefully, because those are the people you’ll be stuck with. Even the six lead characters of Friends, situated as they were in dense and walkable Manhattan, barely managed to date outside of their Central Perk semi-circle.

ABC had our Friday nights locked down with the TGIF lineup, a night of family sitcoms anchored by Full House and Family Matters. TGIF was wholesome, each show had a laugh track and a predictable rhythm, and we’d be snoozing away by the first commercial break of 20/20. Saturday nights were a different matter entirely, especially on Nickelodeon. Saturday night Nickelodeon, SNICK for short, was a schizophrenic cavalcade of kid counterculture, from the psychedelic comedy of Ren and Stimpy to the indie-for-children charm of The Adventures of Pete & Pete to the horror of Are You Afraid Of The Dark to the musical-theater sketch comedy of Roundhouse, and beyond. It was chaos, and I never missed it. (I was in my 20s. Don’t judge me.)

By 1990, daytime television was big business: Oprah made it look easy, Jerry Springer made it look sleazy. Everyone wanted in, and pretty much everybody got in. Tempestt Bledsoe of The Cosby Show, Carnie Wilson of Wilson Phillips, Vicki Lawrence of Mama’s Family, and Gabrielle Carteris of 90210 all tried their hands at daytime talk shows in the 90s, all of those shows’ titles were the host’s first name followed by an exclamation point, and all of them were over— or maybe Over! — before they started. Talk is harder than it looks, even for an industrious soul like Gabrielle Carteris.

“These guys are and will only ever be idiots,” said David Letterman of Beavis & Butthead, when the show’s creator Mike Judge appeared on The Late Show in 1993, “and for some reason I find it incredibly gratifying to watch.” So did we. Yes, those two giggling couch potatoes were stupid. And yes, the animation was so crude and the scripts so threadbare that you felt like you could do it. But you didn’t; Mike Judge did. Judge hit on something universal and ineffable about the American teenager in the 90s, and if you couldn’t put your finger on exactly what it was, Beavis & Butthead themselves would not only not try, they’d laugh at the word “finger.” Judge proved himself to be more than a one-hit-with-two-morons wonder; he’d go on to skewer cubicle culture in Office Space and become a legit Nostradamus with Idiocracy .

Whether it was on the Palladium dance floor that served as the set for Club MTV, or on the questionably-sanitary beaches of Cancun for MTV Spring Break, in the 90s, DTJB was always in the middle of the action. (I call her DTJB. We’re very good friends. She may not know this.) DTJB always knew where the party was, and if there was no party to be found, she was the party. A “wubba wubba wubba” signaled a one-hundred percent probability of good times ahead, and in this way it is the exact opposite of a tornado siren. All of the above is still true. As she did in last year’s maiden voyage of The 90s Cruise, DTJB will dial the fun meter up, always down for a chat or a laugh or a wubba. She’ll be there. I’ll be there. You be there.