Beverly Hills, 90210

Created by Darren Star and produced by Aaron Spelling, Beverly Hills, 90210 premiered on Fox on October 4, 1990, with a fish-out-of-water premise: twins Brandon (Jason Priestley) and Brenda Walsh (Shannen Doherty) transplanted from Minneapolis into Beverly Hills wealth. Around the Peach Pit and West Beverly High — played, in a neat irony, by Torrance High in a decidedly middle-class zip code — the show worked through the era's catalog of Very Special topics: date rape, alcoholism, eating disorders, AIDS, teen pregnancy.

Season one's ratings were poor, and the show was saved by a scheduling gamble: in the summer of 1991, while everything else aired reruns, Fox ran a special 'summer season' of new episodes. Viewership exploded, and 90210 came back that fall as one of Fox's top shows and a genuine international phenomenon. Priestley and Luke Perry — whose Dylan McKay was originally meant to last a single story arc before Spelling overruled a reluctant network — became teen idols of the magazine-cutout tier, while Doherty and Jennie Garth became household names. The scandals ran on both sides of the camera: 1991's 'Spring Dance' episode outraged parents because Brenda lost her virginity and felt fine about it, and Doherty's exits-and-feuds saga ended with her leaving after season four.

The show ran ten seasons, to May 17, 2000 — long enough for its high schoolers to graduate college into adult melodrama — and spun off Melrose Place, whose first episode featured the 90210 cast handing over the torch. It's credited with creating the modern teen soap: the zip code became shorthand for privileged adolescence, and the format it proved — beautiful young ensemble, topical crises, eternal love triangles — got inherited by Dawson's Creek, The O.C., and basically every teen drama since. A short-lived meta-reboot, BH90210, followed in 2019.