Shannen Doherty Made 90210. It Never Stopped Following Her Around.

When an old friend texted me over the weekend with the news that Shannen Doherty had died, I clicked the accompanying article link and felt … relieved. Not at the news that Doherty was dead from breast cancer at just 53. Instead, I was relieved it hadn’t been an overdose. Am I allowed to say that? Is it too blunt, too gauche, making a distinction where there shouldn’t be one? Maybe. But it’s what I felt: relief that, whatever fame had done to her life, it hadn’t left her with that particular disease, warped her existence in that blatantly excruciating, never-ending way; that, even though she was dead, she seemed to have survived fame itself, the white-hot attention and its fading, our judgment and cruelty, being forever stuck playing a character, and the hardest kind to shake, at that—a version of yourself.

By the time Doherty was cast in Beverly Hills, 90210, the definitive ’90s teen soap opera that birthed all the rest, she was more established than any of her peers. Doherty had been acting since she was a kid: Little House on the Prairie, Girls Just Want to Have Fun, Heathers. She’d done adorable and plucky little sisters and the wannabe beta, a résumé that adds up like a mathematical equation, two plus two, to Brenda Walsh.

As Brenda, Doherty was the co-lead of 90210. She, her brother Brandon (Jason Priestley), and their parents were a nuclear family transplanted from the heartland of Minnesota into the sumptuous superficiality of Southern California. There, the sun shone, the palm trees swayed, the teens were terrifyingly sophisticated, and their parents had abdicated all responsibility, cosseting their children in money and negligence. The Walshes’ decency was supposed to be the antidote. They weren’t lost in the glare; they were lighting the way, their Midwestern squareness a salve for SoCal soullessness

Except for Brenda. A girl next door; a beacon of innocence; a plausible Midwesterner: That’s not what Doherty brought to the part. She didn’t have the niceness, the veneer of congeniality, the “Make polite small talk at the checkout line” politesse. No, she wanted in—in with the in crowd, into the bathing suit, into this new, more worldly life. And she wanted in so badly that she was never going to be Californian either. Brandon made everything look easy—down to the perfectly floppy swoop in his forelock!—but Brenda had no chill. She was supposed to be effortlessly popular, but what you felt was the striving, the labor, the eye roll, the clocking status and hierarchy. What you saw was the girl who showed up to the spring dance in the same dress as her supposed best friend and had no perspective or generosity about it all!* Who hated it! Who was mad! Until she lost her virginity to her super dreamy boyfriend that same night, a shot of status and maturity, a bolt up the ladder that freed her, momentarily, into benevolence, dispensation, into “Who cares, it’s just a dress!”

Maybe that’s what people didn’t like about Brenda. Her righteous realpolitik, her prim climbing, the way she was always looking around her, doing the relentless doggy paddle that is adolescence, but so you could hear the shaggy breaths. In the early years of 90210, this made her a punching bag—the subject of the infamous proto newsletter I Hate Brenda. The most sophisticated viewers of 90210 could tell she was a kind of impostor, too earthbound to just slot in as the most popular girl in school—and so they “mean girl”–ed her. She was a Heather, after all. And it wasn’t just on-screen: As the show got more and more successful, even landing Doherty on the cover of Rolling Stone, the rumors swirled about her. Her castmates disliked her. She was difficult. A campaign of gossip and disinformation.

All of this makes Doherty another one of the women we—the tabloids, the viewers, the culture—ganged up on, for crimes not so severe, while men with more power were being far more odious. It was unfair. It was insane. It was typical. But to leave it at that doesn’t engage with what was genuinely prickly in Doherty’s performance. She really had something, but it was close to a soap opera villain thing. Villains are the most beloved characters in that medium because they’re so much more interesting than everyone else: so insatiable, so desirous, so passionate, so self-justifying. Everyone else looks dull by comparison. But 90210 was a teen show—the teen show—and between it and the time, its producers didn’t want to turn its would-be role model into a vamp, to do high-school Dynasty. So they ripped the show up, pushed Doherty out, and installed a proper nice girl in the lead. (Actually, the one who wore the same dress, then stole the dreamy boyfriend, then the show! But she was relatable as hell while she did it!)

To be honest, though, I never hated Brenda. I was too young for all that. The first time I watched 90210, catching one of the summer episodes that turned it into a phenomenon, I must have been at the tail end of elementary school, and all those critiques by savvier, older viewers—the corny issues of the week, the ancient actors—failed to register for me. The series felt grown-up, dramatic, sexy, romantic, somehow inappropriate. What more could I have asked for?

I often look back on what I liked then—whomever the show wanted me to; the girl with the boyfriend—and marvel at how unsophisticated I was. But Brenda made 90210 more sophisticated than it meant to be. She showed how conditional it all was, this status thing: You’re the popular girl, the apple of your parents’ eye, you’ve got the hot boyfriend—then, suddenly, it’s all gone. And merely because of what? Some pheromone you’re emitting? Some minor vibe? And everyone—the whole nation, actually—just turns on you? Brenda might have been paranoid, but she wasn’t wrong. Hierarchy is real, popularity is fleeting, and there’s a black sheep inside all of us. That’s a message about adolescence the show delivered with far more authority than any of its neat lessons about date rape and cancer and divorce.

Then Brenda followed Doherty around. She worked—for years on Charmed, and in smaller shows and TV films after that, and even on the 90210 reboot—but she was stuck playing a version of herself, difficult Shannen Doherty, before that became a highly lucrative mode of performance, in which your agitation and angst are at least remunerative and you can always fall back on the explanation and justification of the bad edit, of being in on the joke, of doing your job. She did some of that playing around, and was still working through her persona in a recent podcast, but it could seem as if she were mired in a particularly claustrophobic form of public nostalgia.

As a stan, I always appreciated the fan service—not that I would have used either of those words back then; they didn’t exist yet!—of 90210 sending Brenda off after one last coupling with her former boyfriend Dylan. I also appreciated that, for some significant part of the show’s run, we were told that the two were together, off-screen, canoodling in Europe. I know that changed as the series went on and on—the umpteen seasons; then reunions; as Luke Perry died—but it’s remained the story I’ve told myself, my headcanon, as it’s called these days. I have some new headcanon since hearing about Doherty’s death: that somehow she knew all the nice things we’d say about her, after she was gone.

Correction, July 16, 2024: This piece originally misstated that Brenda went to prom in the same dress as her best friend. It was the spring dance.