In a world full of reboots, no show is ever off limits — including Saved by the Bell. Series star Mark-Paul Gosselaar didn’t say no when asked about a return to Bayside High, but said it all depends on the right idea.
Gosselaar, 45, told The Hollywood Reporter on the podcast Award Chatter that he’s not a fan of reboots in general but would be open to one if someone pitches a great idea along the same vein as what Robert Mark Kamen created for YouTube‘s Cobra Kai based on The Karate Kid film trilogy.
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“I’m okay, I mean me personally, with never seeing a reboot ever again,” Gosselaar said in a conversation with Scott Feinberg. “I like original content. I really appreciate what Cobra Kai has done. I appreciate what Roseanne has done…what Fuller House has done, it’s great. 90210 now is, I heard, for Fox. But I’m okay with never seeing a reboot ever again.”
When asked if someone could convince him to reboot Saved By the Bell, he said, “Absolutely. If it was a good product that I felt wouldn’t tarnish the original product, then yeah. I’m open to hearing anything.”
Gosselaar, who played popular high school student Zack Morris on the show, admitted that he and his co-stars, including Mario Lopez, Tiffani Thiessen, Elizabeth Berkley, Lark Voorhies and Dustin Diamond, didn’t always get along on set.
“Sometimes we loved each other and sometimes we hated each other,” he explained. “There were moments when [producer] Peter Engel had to sit us down and say, ‘Guys, we have to film a show here,’ because sometimes we weren’t talking to each other because of romantic entanglements — and maybe you would piss off Tiffani and because Tiffani’s friends with Mario, now Mario’s not talking to me. Then vice versa if something happened between Mario and I’m not talking to Mario…
“It was a very small universe that we lived in and we operated in,” he continued. “Sadly, the only one that was always an outsider because he was three years younger than us was Dustin Diamond.”
Last year, Gosselaar said he would be open to a revival of the sitcom as long as it’s “worth everyone’s time.”
“There’s a lot of versions that we see that don’t do it justice,” Gosselaar said at the 2018 Television Critic Association’s Summer Press Tour in Beverly Hills last August. “But I’d like to see a version, yeah, I’d like to see a version that we’d all agree on.”
And in January, he said on an appearance of Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen that he hadn’t spoken to former co-star Diamond, who played Screech, in 25 years.
“1994,” Gosselaar said laughing, as Cohen also giggled. “It’s the truth. I’m not making anything up.”
Notably, 1994 was the same year that Saved By the Bell: The College Years, a spin-off of the iconic teen sitcom, was canceled after only one season.
He previously addressed Diamond during a 2014 interview with HuffPost Live when he was asked about Diamond’s tell-all book, Behind the Bell.
“It is negative — that I must say. Everything I’ve heard about his book is that it is negative, and I don’t remember those things because my experience on the show was very positive,” Gosselaar replied. ” … When people say, ‘Oh you don’t like talking about it,’ it’s like, ‘No, I don’t mind talking about it, it’s just that I don’t remember.’ But also everything I do remember was extremely positive. We still have friendships from it.”
