“TV’s brashest 21-year-old talks revealingly about her wild past, her brief engagement, and ‘people who think I’m a bitch,’” the coverline next to a picture of Shannen Doherty reads on a 1992 issue of People magazine. A year later, on another People cover: “Out of Control! These days, Beverly Hills’ hard-partying, check-bouncing bad girl may be going way too far.”
In the ’90s—before a wave of early-aughts tabloids and bloggers like Perez Hilton made a mint lampooning young, female celebrities like Lindsay and Britney and Paris—Shannen Doherty was popular fodder. Drunken nights out, shotgun marriages, fights at the club, court-appointed anger-management classes, and other run-ins with the law were breathlessly chronicled for a celebrity-obsessed public thirsty to see the unraveling of the stars they tuned in to watch every week. Doherty was deemed unhinged, branded a liability. How the media treated her (and Drew Barrymore, too, for that matter) was a template for the years to follow, when such cruelty would become ever more commonplace and, with the dawn of social media, ever more accessible. Doherty was branded a bad girl; she was called difficult, a notoriously loaded term when lobbed at women.
But for teenage me, those were the very labels that made me fiercely love her. They were labels that Brenda Walsh, the character that arguably made Doherty most famous, had already confronted onscreen. When Beverly Hills, 90210 debuted in 1990, I was in junior high and already deeply familiar with Doherty from her roles as Jenny on Little House on the Prairie, Kris Witherspoon (opposite tween dream Chad Allen) on Our House, and as one of the titular mean girls in the seminal 1980s film Heathers. Brenda Walsh (played by a then 19-year-old Doherty) was introduced to audiences as a wide-eyed girl from Minnesota with a stretchy headband, mousy brown hair, and pastel-hued wardrobe who, along with her goody-two-shoes twin brother, Brandon, had been plopped into the decadence and debauchery of LA. “Nobody knows me here—I could be anybody, I could be somebody,” Brenda says to her brother on the show’s first episode as she anxiously considers what to wear on her first day at a school in a city that was definitely not Minneapolis. Beverly Hills, 90210 would dive into taboo topics like AIDS, domestic violence, eating disorders, suicide, and drug abuse, becoming a runaway hit for producer Aaron Spelling. All these years later, the show remains the pinnacle of teen drama, and Brenda its queen. (Let’s face it: The seasons after Spelling booted Doherty from the cast could never measure up, even with the addition of Tiffani Thiessen’s chaos-courting Valerie Malone.)
Over the course of the four seasons that Doherty was on 90210, Brenda would grow and shift, both in her look (along came the bodysuits, high-waist jeans, endlessly imitated dark brown hair with blunt bangs, and that signature knowing smirk) and her identity. We watched her decide to have sex for the first time (an episode that famously raised conservative eyebrows); contend with a pregnancy scare; fight and make up and break up (to the tune of R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion”) with Dylan; rebel against her parents’ arcane rules; try on new personas (bonjour, Brenda Dubois); get arrested (for protesting animal testing, naturally); and face the aftermath of a best friend’s betrayal. Yet Brenda would also face well-publicized backlash from fans of the show, as people began to conflate the character with Doherty’s off-screen behavior. (There was even a popular ’90s zine called the I Hate Brenda Newsletter.)
Brenda—or was it Shannen?—became the girl people loved to hate. Doherty once said in an interview: “People couldn’t separate me from her, and I got sick of people assuming that I was as naughty and bad as Brenda was. It was all very hurtful.” Though one was fictionalized, they were both up against the complicated pressures of adolescence and wanting to be taken seriously. Both on television and off, Doherty was passionate, she was intense, she was straightforward, she was self-assured, and for all these reasons, she was dismissed and poorly regarded. For those of us navigating our own coming of age, and simultaneously facing harsh judgment from our families and peers, we saw ourselves in Brenda—and, in turn, in Shannen. I know I did.
When the news broke this week that Doherty had died from cancer, prompting an outpouring of social media tributes and Instagram messages from saddened friends, I saw that others felt the same way. Part of the sadness seemed to come from how hard Doherty had fought to live; she’d recently shared on her excellent and refreshingly candid podcast Let’s Be Clear how hopeful she felt about a new course of chemotherapy.
But for many of my fellow Gen X’ers and older millennials, we’d also lost a part of ourselves. We loved Shannen Doherty, we idolized her, but most of all, at some point, we saw ourselves in a version of her. We were all a little wild once; we were all a little difficult. We were all a little Brenda.
