Brenda and Brandon Walsh, the twins with a flowing fringe for him and an instant classic for her, arrived on Spanish television when it was being reborn. Or rather, it was expanding. It was becoming a consumer good and was no longer just the public entity determined to entertain, educate and inform that it had been until then. Before, we only had two channels, at most four in the case of communities like Catalonia that had their own regional television. But in 1990, private channels appeared and, with them, television needed to start being liked in order to compete for the attention of the viewer. And what was there not to like about the Walshes, that pair of attractive and somewhat naive outsiders, who came from cold and grey Minnesota to warm and dreamy California?
Was Feeling of livingeither 90210 Beverly Hills —its original title, the postal code of the exclusive neighborhood in which the protagonists lived—, an excellent introduction to that television in which the American was going to turn the world into a desirable rich suburb, with houses with gardens and baskets next to the garage, normalizing, in the process, the possibility of proms seasoned with punch, and the endless small details that, in these three decades, have been transforming reality at will. Think of Halloween, and what we knew about the matter in 1990 (except for the reference in ET, where many of us discovered this festival), and how we could not suspect that we would end up celebrating it the way we do.
But it wasn’t just that. There were countless small details in the series that shaped a way of consumption, predisposing the viewer in a way that was still unheard of in Spanish audiovisuals. To begin with, let’s not forget that the creator of this early classic of a wannabe exportable is Darren Star, the creator of its older sister, Melrose Place, and her pioneer sister, Sex and the City. Every Darren Star series seems to be telling the viewer how exciting life in America is, almost like a fairy tale, where nothing but the relationships between friends and lovers matter. And why can’t we wish that ours were the same, wherever we are?
In that sense, just like what happens with Carrie, Miranda, Samantha and Charlotte in Sex and the City, Feeling of living was ahead of the curve in creating non-identical female characters, that is, variations with nuances —and intellectual tones, as in the case of Andrea Zuckerman, the smart chick who was the boss of everyone on the school newspaper—, and a non-unique —although still insufficient— representation of girls, defined here by their personality and not so much by the social place they occupied in class. The same occurred with boys. Brandon Walsh himself was the antithesis of the bad boy —Dylan— who until then had been desired by even the most naive girl in class —or so we learned with Grease and everything before, and even after—.
If there was no hint of humor it was because basically Feeling of livingas Melrose Placeit was a soap opera, a drama, of course, in the American style. With a certain glamour and a distinction that allowed it to later evolve and give rise to all kinds of hybrids that reign today on the platform grids, and that, at that time, were produced in industrial quantities. Let’s think about Dawson’s Creekin The OCor even in the more contemporary Gossip GirlIn all of them, if something could go wrong, that something went really wrong.
It was not usual, as happened with the sadly recently deceased Shannen Doherty, the most ambitious of the then famous and millionaire cast, that the actors of the series made the leap to the cinema, and much less, as she did, to auteur cinema – she has a key role in Mallratsby Kevin Smith—, even though the era was beginning to generate its own myths, and any of them could have made the jump. And, having said that, what about the age of those supposed kids? They were supposed to be 16 and 17 years old, but the truth is that they were at least a decade older. Gabrielle Carteris herself (Andrea) was 29 years old, Luke Perry (Dylan) was 24, although it is true that the Walsh brothers were 21 (Jason Priestley) and 19 (Doherty).
This adulthood in apparent adolescents allowed to order a stage that was not at all orderly, and to give a desirable adult stability to adolescence, turning it into a mirage in which nothing hurt too much, or when it did, it was civilizedly bearable. The approach to luxury, which most of the characters enjoyed, was also frankly different from that which is given today – let us think of the rich of Succession and in the rich of Feeling of livingwhy were those so good?—which encourages a contemporary viewing that allows us to analyze how the figure of the wealthy, and their cruelty, has grown and twisted over time. Or has it also been the idea of the world?
Because the world in which it was set Feeling of living It was still a world that used fiction to enchant any kind of reality, turning it into something almost familiar, something for all audiences, especially dreamers, ignoring or barely outlining the real problems of a society that has always tried to see itself as something enviably adequate, correct, harmless, to a certain extent perfect, and perhaps it was so in the minds of the creators of family cinema in the eighties, predecessor and model of series like this one, and of those that tried to continue in the same line until the 2000s, but that could not be, in any way. And yet, the fact that it exists says a lot about the way in which we intended to see, and inhabit, the world.
You can follow EL PAÍS Television on X or sign up here to receive our weekly newsletter.
