Education Quote by Josh Schwartz

It lands like a humblebrag with good comedic timing: while everyone else was mainlining glossy teen melodrama, Josh Schwartz is positioning himself as the kid with “better taste,” already tuned to the adult, joke-dense rhythms that would later define his career. The name-checks do all the work. Beverly Hills, 90210 stands in for high-school social scripts: popularity, romance, image, hierarchy. Seinfeld is the counter-programming: observational, cynical, allergic to sentiment, a show that treats social life as an endless series of petty negotiations and self-inflicted problems. Schwartz isn’t just saying what he watched; he’s telling you which worldview trained his brain.

The gendering is deliberate and a little barbed. “The girls in high school” frames 90210 as feminine-coded and therefore, in the old cultural economy, unserious. He’s describing himself as outside that mainstream, but also reproducing a familiar hierarchy where “male” comedy is smarter than “female” drama. That tension is part of the quote’s utility: it reveals both an origin story and the biases of the era that shaped TV prestige.

Context matters because Schwartz becomes famous for teen TV (The O.C., Gossip Girl) that mixes soap with self-aware humor. The subtext is almost confessional: he didn’t reject teen stories, he rewired them. Seinfeld gave him the dialogue engine and the ironic distance; 90210 supplied the arena. The result is a producer who makes adolescence feel like a joke you can still cry at.