Shannen Doherty was just 19 when she made her debut in the lead role of Brenda Walsh on Beverly Hills, 90210, but she had already lived out an entire narrative arc as an actor. A child star, she began her career with wholesome roles such as Jenny Wilder in Little House on the Prairie and Kris Witherspoon on two seasons of family drama Our House. After working through a series of such characters throughout the 1980s, it was her supporting role in the 1989 teenage black comedy Heathers that showed she had range, playing a scheming mean girl more obsessed with her looks and social standing than anything resembling human decency.
By the time she arrived on 90210 in 1990, she was set to play out this arc again as Brenda Walsh, and likely quite unaware of the life-changing consequences to come. Arriving into the belly of the Californian beast from Minnesota with her brother Brandon, Brenda makes numerous naive and moralistic choices throughout the course of the show’s first season. But by the fourth – Doherty’s final season – she emerges as a complex and problematic young figure, seen by many as a prototypical girl gone bad.
