90210 never stopped following her.

When an old friend texted me over the weekend with the news of Shannen Doherty’s death, I clicked on the link to the article and felt…relieved. Not that Doherty had died of breast cancer at just 53. Rather, I was relieved that it hadn’t been an overdose. Dare I say that? Is that too crude, too crude, to make a distinction where there shouldn’t be one? Maybe. But that’s what I felt: relief that fame, whatever it had done to her life, hadn’t left her with this particular disease that had distorted her life in this obviously agonizing, never-ending way; that, even though she was dead, she seemed to have survived fame itself, the scorching attention and its fading, our judgment and cruelty, the eternal entrapment in a role, and the one that’s hardest to shake off – a version of herself.

When Doherty was cast in the role Beverly Hills, 90210the ultimate teen soap opera of the 90s that spawned all others, she was more established than any of her peers. Doherty had been acting since she was a child: Our little farm, Girls just want to have fun, HeatherShe had played the roles of the adorable and spunky little sisters and the wannabe beta, a resume that, for Brenda Walsh, added up like a mathematical equation, two plus two.

As Brenda, Doherty was co-director of 90210. She, her brother Brandon (Jason Priestley) and her parents were a nuclear family transplanted from the heart of Minnesota to the lush superficiality of Southern California. There, the sun shone, the palm trees swayed in the wind, the teenagers were frighteningly sophisticated and their parents had shirked responsibility and spoiled their children with money and neglect. The Walshes’ decency was supposed to be the antidote. They didn’t get lost in the glare; they lit the way, their Midwestern stuffiness a balm for the soullessness of Southern California.

Except Brenda. A girl next door, a beacon of innocence, a believable woman from the Midwest: That is not what Doherty brought to the role. She did not have the niceness, the appearance of likability, the “polite small talk habit at the checkout.” No, she wanted In—into the trendy crowd, into the bathing suit, into this new, more worldly life. And she wanted so badly to fit in that she would never be a Californian, either. Brandon made everything look easy—right down to the perfectly floppy curls!—but Brenda was completely at ease. She was supposed to be effortlessly popular, but all you felt was the striving, the effort, the eye-rolling, the status, the hierarchy. What you saw was the girl who showed up to prom in the same dress as her supposed best friend and who wasn’t objective or generous about it all! Who hated it! Who was angry! Until that same night she lost her virginity to her super dreamy boyfriend, a shot of status and maturity, a leap up the ladder that momentarily liberated her into goodness, dispensation, “Who cares, it’s just a dress!”

Maybe that was what people didn’t like about Brenda. Her self-righteous realpolitik, her stiff climbing, the way she always looked around, the relentless dog paddling, the Is youth, but you could hear the shaggy breathing. In the first years of 90210that made her a punching bag – the subject of the infamous proto-newsletter I Hate Brenda. The most demanding viewers of 90210 You could tell she was a bit of an imposter, too down to earth to simply be the most popular girl in school – and so she was labelled a “mean girl”. She was a Heather, after all. And not just on screen: As the show became more and more successful and Doherty even made the cover of Rolling Stone, rumors began to circulate about her. Her colleagues didn’t like her. She was difficult. A campaign of gossip and disinformation.

All of this makes Doherty just another woman we – the tabloids, the audience, the culture – gang up on for not-so-serious crimes, while men with more power behave far more heinously. It was unfair. It was crazy. It was typical. But to leave it at that misses what was really appealing about Doherty’s performance. She really had something, but it was almost like a soap opera villain. Villains are the most popular characters in the medium because they are so much more interesting than anyone else: so insatiable, so desirous, so passionate, so self-righteous. Everyone else seems boring by comparison. But 90210 was a teen show—The Teen show – and in between, the producers did not want to turn their potential role model into a vamp to represent high school dynasty. So they turned the show on its head, kicked out Doherty and put a really nice girl in the lead role. (Actually the one who wore the same dress, then had the dream boyfriend and then stole the show! But she was incredibly likeable!)

To be honest, I never hated Brenda. I was too young for that. When I first 90210I must have been in the end of elementary school when I saw one of the summer episodes that made the show a phenomenon, and I couldn’t understand all the criticisms from more experienced, older viewers – the cheesy topics of the week, the ancient actors. The show felt grown-up, dramatic, sexy, romantic, and somehow inappropriate. What more could I have asked for?

I often look back at what I liked back then – whoever the show wanted, the girl with the boyfriend – and am amazed at how uncomplicated I was. But Brenda made 90210 more sophisticated than it should be. It showed how conditional it all was, this status thing: You’re the popular girl, your parents’ favorite, you have the hot boyfriend – and then suddenly it’s all gone. And all because of what? Because of some pheromone you give off? Some insignificant vibe? And everyone – the whole nation, really – just turns against you? Brenda may have been paranoid, but she had a point. Hierarchy is real, popularity is fleeting, and there’s a black sheep in all of us. That’s a message about puberty that the show delivered with far more authority than any of its cutesy lessons on date rape, cancer, and divorce.

Then came Brenda Doherty. She worked for years on Charmedand then in smaller shows and TV movies, and even on the 90210 reboot — but she had to play a version of herself, the difficult Shannen Doherty, before that became a hugely lucrative type of portrayal, where your excitement and anxiety are at least rewarding and you can always fall back on the explanation and justification of the bad edit, privy to the joke, the fact that you’re doing your job. She’s played around a bit, still working on her persona in a recent podcast, but it might seem like she’s sunk into a particularly claustrophobic form of public nostalgia.

As a fan, I have always appreciated fanservice (not that I used any of those words back then, they didn’t exist yet!). 90210 Sending Brenda away after one last date with her ex-boyfriend Dylan. I also liked that we learned for a significant portion of the series that the two were together, off-screen, making out in Europe. I know that changed over the course of the series—the umpteen seasons, then the reunions when Luke Perry died—but it remained the story I told myself, my headcanon, as it’s called these days. I have a new headcanon since I heard about Doherty’s death: that she somehow knew all the nice things we would say about her after she gone.