SPOILER ALERT: This article contains minor details about Deadpool & Wolverine. Read at your own risk!
Shawn Levy has delivered a vast array of film and TV titles that cater to kids and adults alike. He effortlessly navigates between family fare like the Night at the Museum franchise and Real Steel to R-rated comedy fodder like Free Guy and Date Night. In essence, Levy is a rare Hollywood name who produces R-rated TV series and films that are family-friendly. Just look at the cultural phenomenon Stranger Things and the upcoming Deadpool & Wolverine — two projects that are wildly violent with a childlike wonder.
Deadpool & Wolverine delivers exactly what is expected from a 2024 MCU-infused Deadpool movie. It has all the hyper violence and clever quips and lewd jokes we expect from the Merc with a Mouth — even Wolvie gets in on the fun. We also get introduced to Dogpool, and Gen X’ers/young Millennials will love the cameos galore from favorite classic — and I mean iconic 20th Century Fox/Marvel characters played by iconic actors — and one cameo from a character that could-have-been.
It’s a great Ryan Reynolds/Hugh Jackman vehicle that felt like it was supposed to reset the MCU. I don’t think it really did that, but it feels like a breadcrumb that hopefully leads to something better.
Deadpool & Wolverine is fun and all, but my favorite work from Shawn Levy is not his formative Spielbergian pop culture producing work… it’s his fine acting in the iconic Beverly Hills 90210.
The unfortunate death of Shannen Doherty prompted me to do my fifth (or maybe sixth) rewatch the teen dramas of all teen dramas of the ’90s from the primetime soap opera Godfather Aaron Spelling. The third season of the Beverly Hills 90210 is arguably one of the best seasons (by the way, the series can be streamed on Paramount+, but there are a lot of episodes missing — like the one where they met Color Me Badd).
Season three was the summer before the gang’s senior year. We see the Brenda (Doherty)/Dylan (the late, great Luke Perry)/Kelly (Jennie Garth) love triangle unravel and reach its boiling point. It’s also the season when Brenda and Donna (Tori Spelling) go to Paris; Andrea (Gabrielle Carteris) gets hit by a car; Brandon (Jason Priestly) narrates a “racism” episode; David (Brian Austin Green) attempts a music career with Steve (Ian Ziering) as his manager; and Dylan bones a horse lady.
It was a very busy season, but this was also a time when TV series had nearly 30 episodes a season to let stories bloom and get wild.
On May 12, 1993, Fox aired episode 28 titled “Something in the Air”, the last episode before the two-part season finale. This is the episode that engraved the “Donna Martin Graduates” chant into the pop culture lexicon — and Shawn Levy appeared in the episode.
As seen in the clip from the episode above, the 90210 get-along gang walk out during finals in order to protest the school board’s decision to not let Donna graduate because she got shitfaced at prom and passed out in front of Vice Principal Mrs. Teasely (the late, great Denise Dowse).
If anything, Donna would be a hero in 2024 for this type of social media behavior at prom. Nonetheless, her Anita Bryant-like mom played by Katherine Cannon (Donna caught her mom cheating during the Color Me Badd episode!) is in full support of her daughter being banned from graduation.
In the episode, Levy is part of the iconic narrative that has been embedded in my soul since the day it aired. Levy played Howard, a junior in high school and a reporter at West Beverly High School’s prestigious newspaper, The Blaze. Howard works with Brandon and Andrea, and he, alongside his colleague Tobi (T.C. Warner), is supposed to be the “junior” version of Brandon and Andrea.
Tobi and Howard call Brandon and Andrea cowards because at first, they don’t take any action against the school board. They actually convince Brandon and Andrea to do something big so that the Class of 1993 could leave their mark on West Beverly High.
Turns out that Tobi, Howard, and the rest of the junior class are ready to walk out with the senior class because the school board has blasted them with a dress code they don’t want. It becomes, as Jim Walsh says, “a revolution!”
If it weren’t for Levy’s character, Brandon and the gang would not have started the “Donna Martin Graduates!” movement — a phrase that you can probably find on a shirt at Etsy.
As many times as I have watched Beverly Hills 90210, I am very disappointed in myself for not realizing Shawn Levy was part of a historic moment in television history. It only makes sense because he is the man of pop culture that lives in that Venn diagram overlap of family-friendly fun and crazy, wild action comedy fuckery.
The episode is a benchmark TV history… well, at least for Gen X’ers… and maybe some in young Millennials. I was incredibly invested in 90210 at the time and I, like Brandon and the gang, wanted Donna to graduate. And Shawn Levy was part of that journey.
Donna Martin graduates. Donna Martin graduates, indeed.
