Talk about a threat. Part A? You mean I just sat through ten more episodes of something no one really needed. I talked about this also in my YouTube review where I question why we are doing a 90’s Show. The original originally started in 1998, running for 8 seasons. they did try a spinoff, That 80’s Show, which ran one season. So, That 90’s Show started in 2022, at the beginning of a decade. But, the audience that started watching this show lived in the 90’s, and featured a lot of teenagers who related with the teenage cast. These kids now, are trying to live through the 90’s, the same period that we started in, only because of the nostalgia factor.
But, this show gets nostalgia wrong. Since they can’t really materialize many returning or recurring cameos aside from the people who played parents the first time around, they are missing the demographic that would be nostalgic. Raven’s Home has Raven. Fuller House had much of the original cast. Girl meets World featured most everyone at some point, and realized the power of Shawn by having Rider Strong recur heavily. Here, Red and Kitty are expected to hold down the fort with a group of obnoxious facsimiles of what people think we saw in the original cast. Basically, this is Saved By The bell: The New Class.
I can’t stand any of the six kids. even as a gay critic, I’m not drawn at all to their token gay character and his storylines, because he is just not the right representation from the 90’s. Gay kids in the Midwest just did not have this experience. The show isn’t even bold enough to put homophobia front and center, and instead he’s widely accepted. That would make a lot more sense in the 2000’s, which would be two decades behind where we are now. That Millenium Show is what this feels like, against a backdrop of 90’s pop culture references. I hope Carmen Electra got paid for her cameo this season. Paid well.
But, Kurtwood Smith and Debra jo Rupp are just as good as they were before, just with worse writers, and a terrible ensemble. They make every episode better, while the teens figure out who to date, whether or not to work at Hot Topic, and deal with a pregnancy scare. Red and kitty are the reason to watch this, and the season ends with them headed to Paris. I’m praying that the second half of the season is just the two of them in Paris,. Red reacting to the French way of life, while trying to penny pinch would easy fill ten episodes. And it might give the writers some ore time to figure out how to make these new kids feel interesting in their own right.
I don’t watch every reboot, but I liked the Saved By The Bell reboot, and those kids were not carbon copies of things that came before them, plus every living cast member made an appearance, some even more regular than the others. And that show was short-lived, so i can’t really see this going beyond maybe one more season before Netflix drives the nail in the coffin. This is just something that should never be. The audio description by International Digital Center is often thankless, as sitcom narration often is. There’s an excellent description right at the beginning of the season when everyone is running in slow motion that Jame Lemcheck did perfectly.
Otherwise…
Final Grade: C- (boosted heavily by Red and Kitty)