Mark-Paul Gosselaar Shares Regretful ‘Saved by the Bell’ Episode: ‘Tough to Watch’

Mark-Paul Gosselaar doesn’t condone some of the Saved by the Bell episodes that didn’t age well. The 49-year-old actor, who played Zack Morris on the NBC sitcom from 1989 to 1992 as well as on Saved By the Bell: The College Years and the 2020 reboot, talked about revisiting “tough” episodes of the show during a recent appearance on the Pod Meets World podcast.

One of those episodes is the show’s second, “The Lisa Card,” in which Zack charges boys in school to kiss Lisa (Lark Voorhies) so she can get money to pay back her dad after she exceeds his credit card limit. “In terms of storylines, there was one where I was basically whoring out Lisa Turtle to charge people to kiss her without her consent,” Gosselaar said of discussing the episode on his own Saved by the Bell rewatch podcast, Zack to the Future, during the Sept. 3 Pod Meets World episode. “That was a tough one, which we had to preface the episode by saying, ‘We do not condone this. We’re here just to discuss it but this is in the past.”

The second episode Gosselaar struggled to revisit was Season 3’s “Running Zack,” in which his character pretends to be Native American for a class project and wears “a full headdress.” Gosselaar explained, “There’s things that you just would not film nowadays,” calling the episodes “inappropriate” and noting that “we’ve evolved as human beings.”

Approaching those kinds of topics on his own podcast was tricky for Gosselaar. “There are things every single episode that we could pick out. At that point, you try not to be negative. It’s a watch party. People want you to celebrate the product,” he shared. “It’s fragile but overall you’re trying to be positive about the work, saying, ‘It was a different time. And we don’t condone that now but this is what it was. Enjoy!’”

Gosselaar and co-host Dashiell Driscoll, who was a writer on the Peacock revival series, did address “The Lisa Card” during a 2020 episode of their podcast. At the time, Gosselaar said he felt “conflicted” about the storyline. “It wasn’t as carefree and innocent as the last episode,” he said at the time. “But maybe it’s because I’m watching it through these eyes and not the eyes of a 13-year-old or the audience that watched it back in the ’90s.”