What Shannen Doherty Understood About Brenda Walsh
The late actor turned a soapy character into someone we could never forget: a real and unpredictable girl.
When Ezra Pound said “Make it new,” he was not talking about teen soaps. So much of their appeal lies in their predictable storytelling and immediately recognizable characters: the beautiful girl group with the just-complicated-enough underbelly, the standoffish and misunderstood boys who’ll fall in love when the right girls come their way. Even Beverly Hills, 90210—which popularized, and arguably remains the apotheosis of, the genre—was bound by the formulaic demands of network television. When Brenda Walsh, played by Shannen Doherty, complains to her mom in the show’s first episode that she has nothing to wear and doesn’t “have the right hair,” what she means is that she’s a brunette in a world of blondes; complexity, variation, the unexpected and wholly new did not appear often on ’90s TV.
Still, Doherty, who died of cancer earlier this month, was able to make something unforgettable out of Brenda. In a fictional world of tried-and-true tropes, she wasn’t a good girl or a bad girl; she was something more human altogether. Her smirk, those bangs, her roiling, earnest intensity: The screen crackled when she appeared. Doherty’s performance garnered plenty of hate—society doesn’t like a girl it can’t neatly categorize—but also fans who loved seeing themselves in her.
90210’s setup was a classic stranger-comes-to-town storyline, except with siblings. “First day of school, strange city, new house, no friends,” Brenda’s twin brother, Brandon (Jason Priestley), laments in the show’s introductory shot. The Walshes have just relocated from Minnesota to Beverly Hills. “I think we’re gonna need a raise in our allowance,” Brenda says as they drive up to campus; “West Beverly High is tough,” the vice principal warns during his welcome speech.
In its early episodes, the show seemed to be trying to make Brandon the star. He was always, Doherty later said on her podcast, Let’s Be Clear, No. 1 on the call sheet. But Brandon was significantly less dynamic, a cookie-cutter nice boy with harmless good looks. From the moment we saw her in scrunched white tube socks, dumping a pile of clothes onto the floor in search of something to wear, Doherty’s Brenda was the person we wanted to spend time with.
The show initially signals Brenda’s innocence. She got near–straight A’s at her old school and wears flouncy dresses and ill-fitting embroidered shirts. She becomes friends with Kelly Taylor (Jennie Garth), the cool (blond) girl who decides to take Brenda under her wing. “Well, it’s against the law!” Brenda responds, incredulous, when Kelly makes her a fake ID. But Brenda quickly sheds her sweet status. She becomes less meek. She speaks up for herself. She starts dating Dylan, the brooding rich boy played with perfect moodiness by Luke Perry. She wants and yearns and needs. Her clothes fit better. Her hair stays brown, sure, but who else on Earth had a face to pull off those bangs?
[Read: Luke Perry’s career-long act of generosity]
The good girl, in other words, becomes something much more interesting than simply a bad girl; she starts to feel real, and unpredictable. Brenda shows her desperation—for Dylan, for freedom, for something else ineffable—in every gesture, whether it’s her pout or the way she stands in the school’s hallways. She can be self-righteous: “Kelly, can’t you ever stop thinking about guys for one second? I mean, there is more to life,” she lectures her friend in one episode. She wants, of course, to be an actor. She lies to her (sweet, kind, well-intentioned) parents. She and Dylan run away. She is a lot like most of us at one point or another—yes, teenage, but also anyone who has ever felt fiercely about something and gone after it, even if both what you’re seeking and the avenue you take don’t quite make sense.
I was 7 when the show debuted. But in 1990, if your mom was pregnant with her fourth kid and worked a lot, you could get away with watching almost anything. I was 16 when the show ended. Not cool at all, I watched the finale alone in our family living room with a quart of ice cream and sobbed. The year that I turned 25, my husband bought me a box set of all 10 seasons. For months, then years, I watched them—especially those first four seasons, before Doherty got fired—on loop when I was sad.
So much of what’s pleasing about stories we’ve heard before is that, as opposed to life, they have a clear shape: Boy meets girl; they fall in love, have sex, break up; boy cheats on girl with her best friend. (“Kelly, if you’re trying to lose your bimbo image, I honestly don’t think this will help,” Brenda says, memorably, when she catches Dylan with Kelly.) But the best storytellers also understand that if you imbue familiar stories with fresh humanity, they can feel just as thrilling and high-stakes as real life.
They can also feel threatening to viewers who prefer clearly defined characters—ones that match their expectations. Is it any surprise that an I Hate Brenda zine appeared a couple of years into the show’s run? Sassy magazine ran an ad for it. Some choice headlines included “Who Likes Brenda Anyway?” and “Send Her to Slaughter.”
Viewers loved to shun Brenda, but many also seemed thrilled to shun the actor behind her. Doherty was just 19 when the show started—a deeply complicated, struggling teenager who was shoved mercilessly into the public eye, almost wholly conflated with the girl she’d been cast to play. Tabloid reports, late-night jokes, press about bar fights, and allegations of “diva” behavior abounded. It’s a story that’s almost too old to tell: Woman attains fame and power, and acts out; the fury is unrelenting, almost gleeful in its vitriol. Neither Doherty nor Brenda was meek, sorry, or easy. But Doherty, for her part, was never given the space or time to be something more than good or bad.
Another thing about old stories: One of the reasons we go back to them so regularly is because often they’re true. One of the saddest things for me about being a person who tells stories is realizing how seldom even the best and most surprising storytelling does anything to shift the way other people see the world.
I love Brenda, brunette that I am. Wanting, needy, messy, self-righteous are all things that I’ve been called, and that I can be. My mind went to her character when I heard that Doherty had died. But then I started listening to Doherty’s podcast. On it, her voice is raspy. She’s sharp and brash and funny. She’s so clearly the sort of person you call when you need to say, Okay, but really—when you need to chat with someone who won’t gasp or cover their mouth or squirm when you tell them the awful or ungenerous, maybe lawless, thing you did.
I’ve spent the past week walking around, listening to her. Defiant even in the face of Stage 4 cancer, talking with her mother, whom she obviously adored, Doherty gave me what she once gave me with Brenda—a space for intimacy, humor, complexity, and searching. So few people have the courage to be that even in private. What a rare and lovely gift, that Doherty offered herself so completely. What an old and tragic story, that the world didn’t acknowledge or appreciate the fullness of her until after she was gone.