In the past 18 years the rich have gotten richer, income inequality has widened and the middle class has grown ever smaller and more squeezed.
And that’s just the teenagers. The new incarnation of Beverly Hills 90210 made its splashy two-hour debut last week adjusted for inflation. As in Gossip Girl and Privileged, the conceit of 90210 isn’t fish out of water so much as fish moving into an even bigger swimming pool.

On the first season of Beverly Hills 90210, in 1990, an average mid-western family, the Walshes, moved to California from Minnesota, and the kids had to confront—and assimilate—Beverly Hills privilege and snobbery.

The 2.0 versions of the 90210 family, the Wilsons, come from Kansas, but they are hardly outsiders. The father, Harry, is the son of a wealthy, hard-tippling former actress, Tabitha. He is a prodigal Beverly Hills prince who returns to his old high school as the new principal and moves right back into the family mansion, a Renaissance-style villa.

The wealthy on television are now really, really wealthy, and anyone who doesn’t have a beach house and a butler might as well be on welfare. When the Wilsons’ teenage daughter Annie is asked out by a handsome schoolmate, she is dazzled not by his sports car, but by the private jet he uses to whisk her to an after-school date in San Francisco. “That’s what kids here do,” Annie tells her mother. “They have planes. And they go places, and they don’t tell their parents because it’s no big deal.”

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