The creator of YouTube series “Zack Morris Is Trash,” Dashiell Driscoll, is a writer on Peacock’s “Saved by the Bell” reboot. But don’t take the hiring as an endorsement that producers on the new streaming version agree the original TNBC “SBTB” lead character, played by Mark-Paul Gosselaar, is, indeed, trash.
Ahead of the “Saved by the Bell” reimagining’s (what Peacock wants us to call it, yuck) Thanksgiving-timed launch, we told new showrunner Tracey Wigfield (“30 Rock”) and Franco Bario, who has been a producer on every iteration of the teen series since its “Good Morning, Miss Bliss” inception, how (not genuinely) offensive we found the title and conceit of Driscoll’s brilliant Funny or Die series.
So, like, is our charming childhood hero, whom in this version has grown up to be the governor of California, actually “trash”?
“Marginally,” Bario said.
“There are a couple of times where I was like, ‘Eh, [Driscoll, who also narrates the web series] might have a point there on a couple of these,’” he said. “But that is the entertainment about Zack, right, is that he was kind of marginally trash. No matter what he did during those 21 minutes, in the 22nd minute he realized that he learned something, s0, he was well-redeemed. But leading up that moment, meh.”
OK, so that’s one maybe on “trash.”
“Mac Morris (played by Mitchell Hoog) is basically unredeemable trash. He’s like way worse — by design — than his father ever was,” Wigfield said. “His father at least had the cover of existing in 1991. There are kids, like kids that exist now, who also live in a privilege bubble like Mac Morris, who exists in this year and still kind of sucks. He’s much worse, I would say, than his father.”
Alright, well screw Mac Morris — we barely know that dude. His (fake) mom, Kelly Kapowski (Tiffani Amber Thiessen), would probably take issue with Wigfield’s description though.
Watch the relevant portion of our interview with Wigfield and Bario via the video above, and stay tuned to TheWrap for more from the Zoom conversation at Peacock’s “Saved by the Bell” launch.