By Buzz Drainpipe, broadcast via Zine-Fax 2600 / CREASE MAGAZINE #41, October ’94
The year is 1993.
Grunge has detonated across MTV like a slacker atom bomb.
Cobain is already tired of himself.
The Berlin Wall is down, but tuition is up.
And somewhere on NBC, Zach Morris is still talking to the goddamn camera.
"Saved by the Bell: The College Years" wasn’t just a spinoff—it was a desperate attempt to cram the high school myth of the late '80s into the cracked shell of early '90s malaise. It’s what happens when you take a Saturday morning cartoon, shoot it full of Adderall and American Studies classes, and try to pass it off as realism for a generation already allergic to sincerity.
It didn’t work.
But the failure? That’s the beauty. That’s the mirror. That’s the elegy.
đ THE SETTING: FAKE COLLEGE, REAL MELANCHOLY
California University, where you can major in Ethics, Frisbee, and Dating the Same Girl from High School. There are brick buildings, cheap dorm sets, and nothing to anchor the plot to actual reality. And yet, in its absurdity, it captures something real: the way college was marketed to Gen X—as both salvation and scam.
Go to college, they said.
You’ll find yourself, they said.
You’ll read Sartre and bang your RA and everything will make sense.
Instead, we got Zack Morris in Dockers, flunking philosophy and pulling pranks on his roommate while the world outside tuned into Dateline NBC segments about rising student debt and the vanishing dream of the middle class.
đĩ ZACK MORRIS AS TRAGIC HERO
Make no mistake—Zack is a ghost.
A Reagan-era con man too late for the party. He’s a kid who gamed the system so long he forgot there was a system.
In high school, his schemes were charming. In college, they feel desperate. Like watching Ferris Bueller try to dodge a term paper on neoliberalism. His fourth-wall breaks now come off as existential cries:
“Can I get a little help here?”
—Zack, to a God who’s already dropped out.
đĨ´ THE DREAM DIES IN THE DORM
The show was supposed to grow up with its audience—but Gen X didn’t want growth. We wanted authenticity, even if it was dark. Shows like My So-Called Life and Daria understood this. The College Years wanted keg parties and shenanigans in a world where we’d already read Infinite Jest and knew the punchline was depression.
Screech doesn't belong in higher education.
Neither do we.
đ THE DEATH OF THE ACADEMIC MYTH
By the mid-'90s, the idea of college as a great equalizer had curdled. The dream of upward mobility was replaced with a creeping dread:
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Massive debt.
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Diminishing returns.
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Philosophical disillusionment by sophomore year.
And yet here was NBC, trying to force-feed us Mr. Belding's Moral Lessons: University Edition, as if that would stop the quiet horror of graduation without a job lined up.
đĒĻ IN MEMORIAM: THE COLLEGE YEARS
It only lasted 19 episodes.
It’s perfect that way.
A short-lived series about a long-con lie.
It ends not with a diploma, but with a marriage proposal. Because that’s what TV thinks growing up means: locking it down, shutting it off, becoming a sitcom adult.
But for Gen X, college wasn’t where we grew up.
It’s where we started suspecting everything was already broken.
đģ THE LEGACY
Saved by the Bell: The College Years belongs in a cultural mausoleum next to:
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The death of the Pepsi Generation
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Early AOL chatroom angst
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The ghost of the GI Bill
It’s not just a bad show—it’s a cultural exorcism of a false promise.
The American Dream with an extension cord and a futon.
FINAL THOUGHTS FROM BUZZ
I rewatched it all, in one night, with boxed wine and a VHS of Reality Bites whispering from the background.
It didn’t make me nostalgic.
It made me feel seen.
Because maybe, just maybe, we’re all Zack Morris now—talking to a camera that no longer answers.
"Somewhere between Freshman Orientation and Existential Collapse…
We learned to fake it."
– Buzz Drainpipe, dropping out forever, 1994
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