Even by the standards of teen TV in the early ’90s, Saved by the Bell was awful. Its scripts—a litany of indistinguishable classroom pranks, romantic rivalries, sexist jokes and school dances—might as well have been written by aliens whose sole window into earthling culture was Seventeen magazine. While superficially somewhat diverse, the show took place in a fantastical Southern California that had never heard of racism, economic inequality or LGBTQ people.