Just like any high school. Except impossibly good-looking and rich beyond your dreams.
SHOW: 90210
PREMIERES: Season 3 premieres Monday, September 13 at 8 p.m. on The CW.
WHY YOU MIGHT LIKE IT: Beverly Hills—that's where you want to be. You'll enjoy 90210 if you dig shows about rich white-person problems. You're looking for escapist entertainment, not high art. As guilty pleasures go, 90210 is one of TV's best, featuring a bunch of likable, attractive young people in ridiculous situations. And things are only getting edgier: one of the hunkiest guys is coming out of the closet this season.
WHY YOU MIGHT HATE IT: You read "rich white person problems" in the above paragraph and rolled your eyes. Hard. Look, I get it—you can only take so much superficiality and textspeak. If that's the case, you should probably skip 90210: even at its most profound, it's still a teen soap. Come to think of it, you might want to avoid the CW entirely. Or maybe you're just a diehard devotee of the original, and you're tired of waiting for Kelly and Brenda to come back.
THE PREMISE: A reboot of the classic '90s series, 90210 returns to West Beverly High to look at the next generation of Beverly Hills teens. Kansas transplants Annie (Shenae Grimes) and Dixon (Tristan Wilds) pal around with queen-bee-with-a-heart-of- gold Naomi (AnnaLynne McCord), alternachick Silver (Jessica Stroup), and journalism enthusiast Navid (Michael Steger), all while looking fab in clothes you can't afford.
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW: There was a whole mess of drama when last season reached its rather open-ended conclusion. Annie was about to tell her parents that she killed a guy in a hit-and-run, but they've got news of their own: they're getting divorced. Dixon snuck off to Australia to spend the summer with his girlfriend Ivy (Gillian Zinser). West Beverly teacher Ryan Matthews (Ryan Eggold) went on a bender after learning that he knocked up Naomi's sister Jen (Sara Foster). Naomi had problems of her own— she was attacked (and presumably raped) by the creepy Mr. Cannon, who warned that no one would believe her story. And power couple Navid and Adrianna (Jessica Lowndes) reconciled, but it's unclear how long that will last with Adrianna eager to pursue her music career.
That was the most amazing premiere ever.