The 25 Greatest Characters of the Last 20 Years
14. Zack Morris- Saved by the Bell

Zack Morris, as played by Mark-Paul Gosselaar, is surrounded and defined by contradictions. For example:

1. He has a Jewish name but mirrors all of the conservative Christian ideals of his creators Sam Bobrick and Peter Engel. While he often lives a deceitful lifestyle, he prays before his leg operation, which I can’t imagine happening today. (Being afraid of dying from a broken leg, not praying on Saturday morning TV.)

2. He vacillates between being engaged deeply with his school and being ostracized from it. He mocks the student government during the styrofoam protest but clings to it during the oil-drilling fiasco. He stands as Bayside’s most visible rebel, despite his transcendent relationship with its principal. Did your principal ever ask you to take his niece out on a pity date? Did you ever throw a baby shower for your principal? In a classroom? During school? Despite this status as a principal’s pet, everyone at school loves him until he does something like sell them fake jewelry.

3. He is either inconsistent with his commitments or Franco-esque with his time management. He fronts a band one week,* then captains the football team the next, then stars in the glee club—even though the glee club is for nerds—even though his best friend is a nerd.

4. He feels a deep connection with his soulmate Kelly—even though they have nothing in common—but his treatment of her varies wildly. He woos her at the near-weekly proms, but he’ll just as easily crush a ho at The Max.+ He is devoted, as long as that doesn’t necessitate commitment. And this all conflicts with the well-documented fact, at least to those in the Girls of Bayside calendar, that he’s an unrepentant misogynist.

5. Although he has, at different points, stolen cars, driven drunk, made fake IDs, and criminally misrepresented himself, he manages to be gentlemanly and pious when it comes to stopping time with the flash of his hand. What kind of weird situational morality is that? Perhaps we can explain it away with the lack of self-awareness that allows him to tell a mall homeless man, “Where I come from, poor is not having cable.”

6. Despite never doing any work and irritating all of his teachers, Zack scores a 1502 on the SAT and gets into Cal U, a thinly-veiled Berkley replacement. Mr. Belding’s letter of recommendation must have been glowing. Or maybe he got a part-Native American scholarship.

These contradictions do not make Zack Morris complex: They prove how cardboard he really is. Saved by the Bell trades on the line between archetype and stereotype. The characters, who would never hang out with one another in real life, occupy the roles of jock, geek, cheerleader, princess, and activist, with Zack taking over the role of the charming schemer.^ Technically, I would not call him a well-written character at all—a first for this list. But that doesn’t mean he isn’t important.

Obviously, I have seen every episode of Saved by the Bell more than once. I am somewhat ashamed of this fact, even though everyone else my age has seen them all too. Am I ashamed to admit it because Saved by the Bell is such an objectively bad show? Or am I ashamed to admit it because it makes me like everyone else? It’s actually a bit more complicated than that. Zack Morris is a symbol for outdated viewing habits and a relationship with junk culture that a small but specific population experienced during the ’90s.

No one watched Saved by the Bell because it was good; everyone watched it because it was on. During its original run in the early ’90s, it aired on the teenaged no-man’s-land of Saturday mornings, and in syndication it aired in the early evenings after school. I didn’t watch the episodes as much as I absorbed them while struggling with Physics homework. Today I have 138 channels, as well as DVR and unlimited Netflix streaming. In junior high I had a worn-out VHS of GoodFellas and fifty-one channels. (Channel 52 was scrambled porn, which, come to think of it, got enough play to count at least as much as C-Span.) Of course, this beats the three channels my parents had.

The point I’m making is that Saved by the Bell occupied a weird space in popular culture. There was enough programming for something so pandering and sentimental to exist, but there wasn’t enough programming to feel as if I had better options than watching it. It seems as if this development, the accumulation of entertainment choices, would be a completely positive one. But you can tell by my nostalgic tone that we lost something special.

For one thing, I learned a lot about good storytelling from watching terrible storytelling. Even then, I could tell that the plots were contrived, the characters were one-dimensional, and the jokes weren’t funny; but I looked past those deficiencies and found something to latch onto. (Not that this was always genuine. Half of the enjoyment was ridiculing the unintentional comedy of the show. [At one point, as I was just beginning to think of myself as a writer, I wrote a spec episode in which Zack accidentally killed a guy. Lisa doesn’t want to help to bury the body because she might get blood on her shoes. I used to have so much free time.]) I still had to stretch to appreciate the media, whereas we now consume TV by stretching it into exactly what we want.

This process of making yourself find an affinity for a character just to have something to do—even if he’s a fourth-wall-breaking scumbag—is alien to a person with more modern, selective viewing habits. For people five years older and people five years younger than me, Zack Morris is a forgotten piece of pop ephemera. But the rest of you smiled as soon as you saw that picture. We shared a tiny cultural touchstone, and there are only so many of those to go around. Should we really worry so much about where that happy recognition comes from?

*- And into the future, in a bizarre flash-forward episode.
+- High school was a man’s world, but Kelly got her just desserts when Professor Jeremiah Lasky romanced her during the college years. Gee, Zack. I wonder why she would want to shack up with a mature, handsome, accomplished professional instead of a prankster with a wet ‘do.
^- The first time I ever saw The Breakfast Club I went, “Oh, kind of like Saved by the Bell.” That’s supposed to work the other way around, of course.