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Of all the great things about television, the greatest is that it’s on every single day. TV history is being made, day in and day out, in ways big and small. In an effort to better appreciate this history, we’re taking a look back, every day, at one particular TV milestone.
IMPORTANT DATE IN TV HISTORY: May 12, 1993
PROGRAM ORIGINALLY AIRED ON THIS DATE: Beverly Hills, 90210, “Something in the Air” (Season 3, Episode 28) [Stream on Hulu]
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT: If you’re of a certain age bracket, the phrase “Donna Martin Graduates” holds a lot of meaning. Back when there were a lot fewer options for your attention span, teens flocked to a show like Beverly Hills, 90210, watched it on the night it aired, and created a shared culture around it. And since teens are (then and now) impressionable and given to memes (even before that was a thing), the rallying cry “Donna Martin Graduates!” became part of the early ’90s flotsam and jetsam, along with snap bracelets and The Remains of the Day lunch boxes.
These days, the phrase is something of a shibboleth for ’90s kids, still strong in its nostalgic power — it was literally just a part of a challenge on RuPaul’s Drag Race a week ago, and if drag queens are still talking about you, honey you know you’re doing something right (or are CeCe Peniston) — but it’s worth it to dig into the episode from which it came and recapture a bit of our cultural history. Which is why it’s good that Hulu is here for us.
As you can tell from its title, “Something in the Air” fancies itself a political agitator, named after the 1969 Thunderclap Newman song that shows up in all kinds of stories about the student-protests of the Nixon era. There was always this weird undercurrent that Brandon Walsh was supposed to be this prodigy politician in the making, spurred on by his dad’s occasional nostalgic waxings of his own past as an agitator. And if Brandon’s path was a hero’s journey — and the show certainly often made it seem like it was — then this episode represented the initial “refusal of the call” (as he and Andrea initially decline to make waves in the student newspaper) before ultimately picking up the gauntlet and leading a huge student protest.
Protesting what, you ask? Well, poor benevolent idiot Donna Martin drank too much champagne on an empty stomach at prom and was visibly drunk, and since this was the first recorded instance of teenage inebriation in modern history, the draconian folks at the Beverly Hills school board decided to throw the book at her and bar her from graduation. One of the smartest things Beverly Hills 90210 ever did was completely deny its characters any sense of perspective. Everything that was happening to them was the first time, the best time, the worst time, the end of the world, the top of the mountain, the depths of despair. In that way, it was the most teenage thing about a show cast almost exclusively with mid-twentysomethings (Gabrielle Carteris was THIRTY-TWO when this episode aired). For Donna, not graduating with her friends was the literal end of the world, and her friends who saw something about Vietnam protests in a movie once decide they’re going to overthrow the while damn system and march on the school board. With any kind of adult perspective, it’s a bunch of brats whining about their bestie getting punished for breaking the rules. But for the eight main characters of Beverly Hills, 90210, they were slaying a dragon.
