Perspective: Luke Perry came full circle, from heartthrob rebel to sensitive dad
Luke Perry, here in 2001, died at age 52 on March 4. By Hank Stuever Hank Stuever TV critic Email Bio Follow TV critic March 4 at 9:17 PM Like any new decade, the 1990s did not arrive fully formed. They came with a pile of the previous decade’s holdovers — Milli Vanilli, Michael J. Fox, Madonna and the usual yawns. Grunge was but a distant rumor, as was the Internet.
Before long, you could get college credit for deconstructing “90210.” It arrived with such sturdy American high school archetypes, like pages ripped and rewritten from an old “Archie” comic book. These proto-teens were now in need of renewed, urgent scrutiny in a decade preoccupied with wealth, teen sex, abortion, drug abuse, the issues.
Here is the part where I ought to go deeper on Perry’s character and his impact on the show, back to the Peach Pit as it were, and reference Dylan’s words and deeds, and how or whether they mattered. I want to, but the point of these breaking celebrity-death tone poems is always this: The clock is ticking, and your time is short.
We all had to know. On the cusp of “90210’s” second-season premiere, The Washington Post sent a Style reporter to Los Angeles to meet him at the Four Seasons and talk over breakfast. He was 20 minutes late and slid into the booth with such a perfectly casual nonchalance that it took a paragraph just to describe it. “This groggy morning, he’s come in character, or maybe he is his character,” wrote reporter Carla Hall. “He’s all devil-may-care attitude and bad-boy flirt.
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