Saved by the Bell: The College Years

Saved by the Bell: The College Years Watch-Order, curated for maximum thematic collapse, character arc chaos, and existential hilarity.

🎓 Zack Morris’ Campus Spiral: The Meta-Narrative Edition

Forget airing order. Here’s how to watch The College Years if you want to experience it as a surreal Bildungsroman where a pop culture trickster god (Zack) slowly realizes that charisma, manipulation, and unearned confidence mean nothing in a collapsing American mythos.

🧭 1. “Professor Zack” (Ep. 8)

Start with the fraud. Zack impersonates a professor to boost his GPA. It’s dumb, illegal, and perfect—because it plants the central thesis:

Zack Morris isn’t in college. He’s in a simulation of one. This is the “fake it ‘til the real world kicks your teeth in” opening chapter. The ruse doesn’t work, and neither will Zack’s approach to life.

🧪 2. “Rush Week” (Ep. 5)

Slater’s desire to fit in gets him hazed. Zack sees frat life as a scam.

Welcome to Gen X’s disillusionment with institutions: Greek life, the military, college itself. This episode shows how every promise of belonging masks the violence of assimilation.

💘 3. “Guess Who’s Coming to College?” (Ep. 2)

Kelly arrives. Everything changes. The episode pretends this is about romance, but really it’s about Zack's childhood crashing into his supposed adulthood.

You can't move forward when you’re dragging your high school behind you.

📚 4. “The Poker Game” (Ep. 10)

Zack loses his tuition money in a poker game.

Literal metaphor: He gambled on the dream of college—and lost. You’ll feel the rot set in. Even Screech can’t math his way out of this one.

📉 5. “Love and Death” (Ep. 13)

A classmate dies. The show goes “serious.” Zack actually mourns. The camera doesn’t wink. It’s weirdly affecting.

For one moment, the sitcom mask slips—and we see the terror behind the laugh track. This is the "heart of darkness" of the series.

🛑 6. “Slater’s War” (Ep. 16)

Slater confronts his Chicano identity and challenges his father’s military past. NBC had no idea what to do with this plot—but the earnestness stabs you right in the ribs.

It’s the best episode the show wasn’t equipped to make.

🛠 7. “Pilot” (Ep. 1)

Now loop back to the beginning, with all illusions shattered. It plays like a false memory—Zack and the boys arrive bright-eyed and hopeful, but we know what’s coming.

This is a postmodern joke: a sitcom prequel after the fall.

💍 8. “Marry Me” (Ep. 19)

The finale. Zack proposes to Kelly because the future is a void and commitment is the only thing left to grasp.

They don’t graduate. They don’t get jobs. They get married. It’s not a resolution—it’s a capitulation.

💀 9. “A Thanksgiving Story” (Ep. 11)

The gang serves food to the homeless. Mr. Belding shows up.

Everyone’s pretending this is normal. It’s not. This is the “network morality play” coda. A reminder that TV can’t fix anything. It can only gesture, awkwardly.

📼 10. “Zack, Lies and Videotape” (Ep. 7)

End here. Zack tries to manipulate everyone by faking a documentary for class.

It’s about media distortion, performance, and self-mythology. It’s Saved by the Bell about Saved by the Bell. The snake eats its tail. Zack records himself… fading into irrelevance.

🧾 Optional Bonus Episode (Not Aired But Spiritually Canon):

“The Student Loan Crisis Will Be Televised” – Buzz Drainpipe imagined episode. Zack wakes up at age 35 with $93K in debt, teaching night school, and trying to pawn his wedding ring for boxed wine and expired burritos. Screech sells herbal supplements on public access TV.

🔄 Why This Order Works

It turns a shallow sitcom into a surrealist indictment of the American Dream.

Zack = Trickster turned tragic clown

Slater = Masculinity in meltdown

Kelly = Nostalgia weaponized

Screech = The ghost of the 1980s, unwanted and echoing

Buzz Drainpipe’s Viewer’s Guide to Post-Sitcom Collapse Vol. 1 of the Laughter Fallout Series // Published by CREASE MAGAZINE, bound in cracked plastic VHS cases and the dreams of latchkey kids everywhere

📺 INTRODUCTION: LAUGH TRACKS AND TRIGGER WARNINGS

This ain’t your grandma’s TV Guide. This is the irradiated manual for what happens after the “very special episode.” After the last freeze-frame. After the credits roll and the cast takes non-union gigs and existential inventory.

In this guide, we’re not watching for comfort—we’re watching for ghosts. For signs of life in the ruins of the sitcom illusion. For the haunted terrain between canned laughter and cultural collapse.

🧠 SECTION ONE: THE CRACKED HEROES OF THE CATHODE WASTELAND

🎓 Zack Morris (Saved by the Bell: The College Years)

Collapse Type: Narrative echo chamber

Diagnosis: Smiling husk in a decaying institution

Buzz Note: “Zack is a sitcom god forced to walk the earth with mortals. He talks to the camera but the camera no longer talks back.”

🧼 Tony Micelli (Who’s the Boss?)

Collapse Type: Masculine role reversal whiplash

Diagnosis: Emotional janitor complex

Buzz Note: “He cleaned the house but couldn’t mop up the gender panic of the early ‘90s.”

🛋 Dan Fielding (Night Court)

Collapse Type: Libido-to-loneliness spectrum inversion

Diagnosis: Repressed trauma clown

Buzz Note: “He’s every horny punchline re-evaluated through a post-#MeToo lens. The robe of justice was always just a bathrobe.”

🔥 SECTION TWO: BURNOUT SETTINGS & DYSTOPIA DECOR

The Dorm Room (College Years) Every lamp flickers with unfulfilled promise. The beanbag chair is full of tears and tuition slips.

The Empty Studio Apartment (After the Spinoff Fails) One framed headshot. One unopened jar of salsa. One answering machine that still beeps—just once, every Thursday night.

The “Where Are They Now?” Segment (E!) Coded distress signals disguised as interviews. Watch the smile not reach the eyes.

📼 SECTION THREE: VIEWING INSTRUCTIONS

Step 1: Begin at Night

Only after 11PM. Only with microwave pizza and a thirst for psychic rot.

Step 2: Mute the Laugh Track

Imagine the silence between punchlines. That’s the real story.

Step 3: Pause Often

Freeze-frame Zack mid-scam. Pause when Balki from Perfect Strangers stares blankly.

Ask yourself: What happens after this scene? What job did this character not get? What city will forget them next?

Step 4: Write Your Own Episode Titles

Examples:

“Will Work for Closure: The Charles in Charge Unemployment Arc”

“Laverne & Burnout”

“Empty Nest, Empty Soul”

📚 SECTION FOUR: RECOMMENDED VIEWING FOR COLLAPSE CONNOISSEURS

Show

Episode

Collapse Flavor

Family Ties

“A, My Name Is Alex”

Postmodern grief breakdown in sitcom drag

The Cosby Show

“The Last Barbecue”

Repression with coleslaw

Roseanne (OG run)

“Into That Good Night”

Class collapse, meta-script fragmentation

Full House

“Stephanie Plays the Field”

Childhood as performance trap

The Fresh Prince

“Papa’s Got a Brand New Excuse”

Abandonment as Emmy bait, but real as hell

🕳 SECTION FIVE: BUZZ DRAINPIPE'S RULES FOR SURVIVING SITCOM COLLAPSE

Trust no laugh that comes too easy.

If someone says “everything will be okay,” they’re lying or going to be cancelled.

Every sitcom dad is 6 months away from writing beat poetry.

There’s always a couch. It’s never comfortable.

The real finale is the moment they stop believing in the bit.

🌀 CLOSING THOUGHT

The sitcom was never real. The collapse is. Welcome to rerun purgatory, baby.

Let Buzz be your guide. We’ll channel surf through the wreckage together.

Bachelor’s Degrees and Bachelor Parties: The Last Days of Zack Morris A Buzz Drainpipe Epilogue // CREASE MAGAZINE #47, July ’95 Scanned from a beer-stained double-page spread, underlined in Bic pen, taped inside a dorm room closet door from which no one ever fully emerged.

There comes a time in every young trickster’s life—every high school grifter, every bleach-blond boy king of consequence-free hijinks—when the mirror cracks. When the fourth wall he’s been breaking since age fifteen turns around and breaks him back.

For Zack Morris, that time was somewhere between his botched tenure at California University and the part of the pilot script for Saved by the Bell: The New Class that he never read.

🎓 THE DEATH OF ZACK, THE IDEA

Zack was always a cartoon character pretending to be real. That was his magic. That was his doom.

In high school, he was the Platonic ideal of Reagan Youth: white, clever, consequence-immune, and so relentlessly cool that even his own mistakes high-fived him on the way out the door. He was Ferris Bueller without the politics. Bart Simpson with better bone structure.

But then came college. And like a Gold's Gym Jesus, the stone rolled back to reveal… nothing. No job. No thesis. No worldview. Just a guy proposing to his high school girlfriend because the writers didn’t know what else to do.

The ultimate graduation gift: narrative abandonment.

🍾 THE BACHELOR PARTY

According to urban legend—and three drunk screenwriters I once interviewed in the parking lot of a Burbank Chili’s—Zack’s bachelor party was never filmed, but the outline leaked. It was supposed to be Episode 20, post-finale, never aired.

Here’s what the script allegedly said:

Screech hires a magician that accidentally sets fire to the cake.

Slater brings two women who are both his “cousins.”

Mike the RA gives a heartfelt speech about the gridiron and how love is like zone defense.

Zack gets drunk and tries to call his Philosophy 101 professor to say, “You were right.”

Kelly never shows up.

Fade out. No lessons. No growth. Just a VHS camcorder recording a guy in khakis, weeping quietly into a bowl of popcorn chicken.

📉 POST-COLLEGE, PRE-MYSPACE

Zack didn’t make it into the '90s intact.

He tried to get into advertising. Got fired for pitching a Doritos campaign involving time travel and bikinis.

Taught a media literacy course at a community college, where he played old footage of himself and called it “autoethnography.”

Started a podcast in 2004 called The Fourth Wall is a Lie, but it only had four listeners—three of them were ex-boyfriends of Lisa Turtle.

Moved to a co-living situation in Silver Lake where he insisted on being paid in Blockbuster coupons.

Eventually, the smile faded. The schemes ran dry. And the last time anyone saw him, he was on a local access show in Bakersfield, selling reverse psychology coaching sessions to ex-sitcom writers.

📼 EPILOGUE IN VHS FUZZ

Imagine Zack in a dusty garage somewhere, watching old tapes of himself grinning, conning, dancing, time-freezing…

And then turning off the TV.

And sitting in silence.

And whispering:

“Can I get a little help here?”

But this time, no one responds.

🧾 BUZZ’S FINAL NOTE

Zack Morris didn’t grow up— He was grown out of.

The myth of the eternally charming boy-king couldn’t survive the unpaid internships, the digital age, the rent hikes, the gut-sickness of the new millennium.

He got a bachelor’s degree in charm. But the world was looking for a résumé.

And so he lives on—in reruns, GIFs, ironic t-shirts worn by kids who don’t remember the name of his school.

He is Schrödinger’s slacker: forever young, forever fading.

RIP Zack. You were the last king of a dead genre. And your kingdom was made of cardboard lockers and laugh tracks.