Saved By The Bell Episodes That Wouldn't Happen Today

As a kid, you probably laughed along with super cool teen heartthrob Zack Morris as he got up to his zany exploits, but when you think about Saved by the Bell as an adult, the first thing you realize is that Zack is quite possibly the worst person in the world. He's casually cruel to his "friends," he's constantly exploiting others to get money (even though he's already rich), and most of all, he's a total creep to the women who have the bad luck to be trapped in the orbit of his endless scheming.

Case in point, season two's "Model Students," in which the plot revolves around a mixture of Zack's two favorite hobbies: capitalism and revenge porn. After utterly failing to line his pockets by making the school store a profitable business, Zack and his slavering hench-nerd, Screech, decide to secretly take pictures of the girls' swim team to make calendars. Surprisingly, this doesn't even lead to Zack getting a stern talking-to. Instead, when a creep photographer shows up in pursuit of more salacious photos of a bunch of underage girls taken without their consent, Zack preys on his victims' desire for fame and weasels his way into being the girls' modeling manager.

As much as it might make the Millennials in the audience feel like crawling into an open grave to rest their weary bones, this episode first aired 30 years ago. If this plot happened today, we'd hope that it would lead to less of Zack getting 10% of Kelly, Lisa, and Jessie's modeling earnings and more of the Bayside Swim Team re-enacting the ending of Death Proof.

Over the course of Saved by the Bell, Zack tried to manipulate and coerce his classmates through methods that would likely end with felony charges today (and probably should've back then, too). And one of his worst offenses has to be the time he tried to brainwash the school through subliminal messages in order to get a date to a dance.

Here's the thing, though ... Zack's deranged actions, reprehensible as they are, might not actually be the most ill-advised behavior in the episode. When his plot — which works, by the way — is discovered, the entire school decides to turn the tables on him, leading to a scene where every girl at Bayside tries to swarm him while moan-chanting his name like they were a herd of zombies on The Walking Dead. It makes sense that the students would want this public revenge. Where it goes off the rails is when the teachers get in on it.

Even with the fact that "my teachers staged an elaborate prank involving the entire school in order to publicly humiliate me after I tried to use mind control on Kelly Kapowski" is the kind of sentence that would make a network censor's head explode, the adults are the most worrisome factor. Both Principal Belding and Miss Wentworth engage in fake seduction attempts on Zack who, just to be clear, is a high school freshman. Oh, and also the tape that Miss Wentworth makes to teach the kids about subliminal messages includes a line about how they should hook her up with their single fathers. If you think about this episode for like two seconds here in the 2020s, there's nothing about it that's not truly horrifying.

In "Rent-A-Pop," Zack engages in some highly relatable teenage hijinx by hiring an actor to impersonate his father at a parent-teacher conference, so that his dad — who's absent most of the time anyway and whose neglect shaped Zack into the nightmare child that he is — doesn't find out that he's been spending all of his time at school on truly upsetting schemes. You know, like we all did. Classic school days stuff.

We kid, of course. Taking things one step past a logical extreme is what makes a sitcom work, and considering that the show includes literal super powers and a sentient robot that nobody ever mentions as being unusual, it's far from the least relatable things have ever gotten over at Bayside. While we're on the subject of Kevin the robot, though, the reasons this episode wouldn't fly today are mostly related to the technology that actually showed up over the past three decades. For one thing, social media would make it nearly impossible for Zack to convince Belding that James the actor was his dad, no matter how good a performance he was turning in.

Second, and far more pressing for today's audience, that title has to go. These days, going out and finding an out-of-work actor you can pay to be your daddy for a couple of hours has a very different connotation.

One thing you have to give to "Running Zack," in which young Mr. Morris learns that racist stereotypes are bad, is that its heart is in the right place. It's one of the few episodes that actually addresses the fact that Zack is kind of a terrible person and shows him trying to address that and improve himself. His methodology, though, leaves quite a bit to be desired.

On the one hand, there are a lot of individual pieces here that feel like they could be relevant to today's audience, like Jessie grappling with her guilt over finding out that her ancestors were slave traders and pressuring Lisa to absolve her of her familial sins. Also, depicting Chief Henry as completely shattering the stereotypical Native American image held by Zack (and the audience) was a very good choice on the part of the show.

On the other hand, Zack showing up in buckskins, face paint, and a war bonnet, identifying himself as "Running Zack" (because he's on the track team), and delivering his class presentation in a stern monotone is ... less than ideal. It's tough to imagine the story resolving in quite the same way, especially given that while Zack Morris the character is revealed to have Native ancestry, Mark-Paul Gosselaar the actor does not. No matter how well-intentioned it was, getting some justifiable complaints about "redface" would've kept this one on the cutting room floor.

If you know one episode of Saved By the Bell, it's "Jessie's Song," the infamous "very special episode" that deals with the pressing issue of teen addiction ... to caffeine. The original concept for the episode was that Jessie would get addicted to speed — as in, actual amphetamines — in her pursuit of academic perfection. Unfortunately, NBC's Standards and Practices department didn't actually want to show a teenager doing drugs, which makes things pretty difficult, especially when the script has already been written. In the end, according to series producer Peter Engel (via Vulture), someone in the writers room suggested nerfing the drug use to something a little less harsh, and Jessie's illegal uppers were swapped out for caffeine pills without changing anything else about the script. As a result, Jessie's reaction to ingesting the equivalent of about five cups of coffee is a manic breakdown of truly epic proportions.

Needless to say, it's pretty tough to imagine this one making it to the air these days, although admittedly, this was a weird one even at the time. Part of the reason it sticks out in so many viewers' memories is that we all knew that Jessie's crushing withdrawal from, y'know, a grande espresso was over the top even back then. The problem isn't the subject matter, though. It's that it's presented as completely serious — with Elizabeth Berkley and Mark-Paul Gosselaar's genuinely intense acting making some lemonade out of the toned-down script — without ever crossing the line into (intentional) comedy.

Compare that to today's most notable teen drama, Riverdale, where a high school sophomore spends her afternoons operating a secret speakeasy. The closest they got to this plot, sandwiched between Archie being forced into a bare-knuckle boyfights league while in prison and the long-running Satanic Panic arc about a Dungeons & Dragons monster created by a secret teen cult, came in the stories about drugs called "Jingle Jangle" and "Fizzle Rocks." Admittedly, the two shows take very different approaches to their subject matter, but if we told you that one of them involved a kid with the unexplained ability to stop time, and you didn't know which one it was, would you really be able to guess?