Aging & Wisdom Quote by Aaron Spelling

Television, Aaron Spelling argues here, isn’t something you merely watch and forget; it’s something you haul around in your head like a catchphrase you can’t shake. The casual phrasing (“But it’s true”) reads like a veteran producer brushing aside theory in favor of street-level evidence: people remember what hits them at the right age, in the right format, with the right weekly rhythm. “It’s like 90210” isn’t just name-dropping a flagship series. It’s a claim about cultural stickiness: a show can become a shared reference point so durable it erases its competitors from memory.

The rhetorical move “Tell me what young shows were being done then...” is the knife. Spelling isn’t inviting an answer; he’s wagering you can’t supply one. That’s subtext as strategy: success is proven by the absence of rivals in the audience’s recall. He frames attention as the real currency, a zero-sum contest where the winner doesn’t just dominate the ratings, it dominates the mental archive.

Then he pivots to global reach: “thrilled about the ratings around the world.” This is Spelling the industrialist, not the auteur. In the late ’80s and ’90s, American TV was becoming exportable lifestyle packaging, and 90210’s aspirational teen drama traveled because it sold a legible fantasy of youth, status, and crisis. The line quietly reveals the producer’s creed: make it portable, make it memorable, make it measurable. The art is in how seamlessly those goals can masquerade as entertainment.