The character of Brenda Walsh, played by Shannen Doherty on Beverly Hills 90210, can be summed up in a 30-second clip that came during season four. The group of teens we dutifully followed through high school were now students at fictional California University and there was an earnest three-episode arc about the theater department’s competitive production of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Aspiring actress Brenda had landed the leading role of Maggie via dubious measures and her jealous, off-kilter understudy, Laura, tried to sabotage her by placing a fake phone call saying rehearsal was moved to a different time.
When Brenda figures out what happened after missing her call time, the scene she delivers to Laura and Steve Sanders, Laura’s boyfriend who is also Brenda’s brother’s best friend, is bone-chilling. She quietly and calmly eviscerates them both, her voice dripping with ice, her body language confident, her intense green eyes flaming. “I always knew you were weak,” she says to Steve, not letting it go as they turn to leave. “One more thing, Laura,” she spits. “I may have missed rehearsal, but I’m still Maggie. And you still have nothing…well, except for Steve, which is kind of the same thing I guess now, isn’t it?”
Watching those words back 30 years later, I’m still struck. Doherty’s delivery is cutting as hell. It’s committed, it’s confident, it’s a scene during which a female character stands up for herself and isn’t afraid of not being liked or offending anyone, including one of her oldest friends. It is the absolute essence of Brenda Walsh.
When viewers were introduced to the character of Brenda when the seminal teen soap aired on Fox in the fall of 1990, we didn’t know what we were in for. On paper, the role was fairly cliché—a wholesome Minnesota teen moves with her twin brother and parents to excess-filled Beverly Hills, California, to attend high school. But from the second she appeared on televisions across the country, it was obvious Doherty, who passed away Saturday, July 13, after a long battle with cancer, was determined to buck any built-in tropes that inevitably came with being on a prime-time teen soap. In every scene she was in, she played Brenda with the gale force of a midwestern winter and took what could have been a generic fish-out-of-water character to transcendent heights, seamlessly going from moon-face cutie in stretch headbands to sculpted beauty who didn’t take shit from anybody.
Because 90210 was a show targeted to teenagers, it over-indexed on Very Important Issues. In season one alone we got storylines about shoplifting, affirmative action, breast cancer, date rape, drunk driving, peer pressure, absentee parents, learning disabilities, the plight of the undocumented shift worker, AIDS, underage drinking, shady athletic recruitment practices within the LA school system, diet pills, and teen moms. And yet no matter what clichéd material she was given, Doherty imbued her character’s problems with palpable emotional depth and a pursed-lipped intensity that was commonly written off as bitchiness.
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