Pretty much everybody has seen at least one episode of ‘Saved by the Bell,’ the saccharine high school comedy in which a group of teens, led by charismatic psychopath Zack Morris, got into endless hijinks ranging from stupid to really fucking stupid. It’s been syndicated into perpetuity and completely impossible for anyone to have avoided over the past three decades. Well, one episode has been so controversial as to have kept it from endless TBS replays, which is exactly what we’re going to talk about today. That’s right. We’re going to look back on the time Zack and the gang helped the Menendez brothers murder their parents.
Widely seen as the episode that took the series too far, it culminated in the very real murders of José and Mary Louise “Kitty” Menendez, and portrayed Zack, Slater, Screech and Kelly as culpable parties in the patricide. We never really understood why the show’s writers decided to take such a dark turn, especially when the kids’ other capers consisted of creating their own spaghetti sauce and acting in Bayside’s production of Snow White. Why then, did this episode have Zack printing a fake driver’s license for Erik Menendez so he could purchase a shotgun from a Big 5 Sporting Goods store in San Diego, which he then used to shoot his own father in the back of the head?
We have never received a suitable answer to this question, nor do we understand the motivation behind the scene where Screech, comically disguised as a cleaning lady, helps the two killers dispose of their bloodstained clothes without alerting the neighbors. The bumbling antics of the lovable goofball are sharply juxtaposed by the sight of the viscera-spattered sweaters he douses with gasoline and lights on fire. It also makes the next episode, in which he is roped into running in the beauty pageant to satisfy a bet between Zack and Slater, seem dishonest and patronizing by comparison. After all, this is the same character viewers had seen burying a still-smoking shotgun beside Mulholland Drive just one week before.
While we may never fully understand what prompted the creative minds behind the show to make such an ungodly aberration, much less the executives at NBC in greenlighting it, we can see it as a means of appreciating the otherwise light-hearted and whimsical adventures of the Palisades natives. After all, what better way to cherish their usual pranks than by watching them take part in one of the most notorious killings of the 20th Century?
