Jason Priestley Wanted to Pull the Plug on ‘90210’—Then Aaron Spelling Made Him Choose Between Brandon Walsh and His Sanity
The original teen soap had comas, surprise siblings and one very over-it star. Now Priestley says he begged Aaron Spelling to end the show before walking away—and accidentally torpedoing Brandon and Kelly’s wedding.
Brandon Walsh was supposed to be the sensible one. The guy with the moral compass, the journalism career and the permanently concerned expression of a teenager who had somehow become the only adult in Beverly Hills.
But behind the scenes, Jason Priestley was apparently looking at Beverly Hills, 90210 and thinking: enough with the comas.
During Friday’s episode of Jennie Garth’s 9021OMG podcast, Priestley revealed that he wanted the Fox hit to end before it completed its ten-season run. The problem, as he saw it, was not that the show had stopped being successful. It was that the storylines had started drifting into full daytime-soap territory—and he could no longer see a graceful exit.
“There was lots of crazy stuff that happened in that eighth season,” the actor recalled. In particular, he pointed to plots involving comas and surprise appearances by characters’ siblings, saying the series had begun to feel “very daytime-y.” That is an extremely polite way to describe the era when a show about wealthy California teenagers started behaving like it had been possessed by three afternoon soaps and a network executive with a deadline.
Brandon Walsh had entered his ‘please let me leave’ era
Priestley had played Brandon since the series premiered in 1990, when he and twin sister Brenda arrived in Beverly Hills from Minnesota and immediately became the moral center of West Beverly High. Over the years, Brandon survived teenage drama, romantic drama, family drama and the particular kind of emotional weather that only exists in a show where every school dance can become a life-altering event.
By Season 8, though, the original shape of 90210 had been stretched almost beyond recognition. Shannen Doherty had already left after Season 4, taking Brenda—and one of the show’s most combustible personalities—with her. The cast still included Priestley, Garth, Luke Perry, Ian Ziering, Tori Spelling, Brian Austin Green and Gabrielle Carteris, but the center of gravity was shifting.
Priestley said he approached the late producer Aaron Spelling with a simple pitch: let’s stop while the show is still on top.
“Aaron, man, let’s end this. Let’s go out on top,” Priestley remembered telling him.
Spelling, according to Priestley, was having none of it. “They’re going to pull me off this set in a body bag,” he allegedly told the actor, making it clear that the show was not ending on his watch. Spelling insisted he was “never ending the show,” leaving Priestley with the most 1990s television dilemma imaginable: remain loyal to a hit series that no longer felt creatively satisfying, or leave while the brand still had enough heat to follow him out the door.
So Brandon left Beverly Hills for Washington
Priestley chose the exit. He said he wanted to pursue other things “with my career and in my life,” and walked away early in Season 9 in 1998. Brandon’s departure was written as a move to Washington, D.C., where he would pursue journalism—an ending that at least honored the character’s long-running identity as the earnest reporter in a zip code full of chaos.
It was also, in retrospect, a slightly awkward moment to discover that the show had nearly reached the finish line. The original 90210 ended only a year and a half later, on May 17, 2000.
“If I’d have known the show was only going to go for another year and a half after I left, I would have stayed,” Priestley admitted.
That is the kind of career confession that makes television history feel suddenly personal. Priestley did not leave an obscure series limping through syndication. He left one of the defining teen dramas of its era, only to watch it wrap up not long afterward. The timing was bad enough. The romantic fallout was worse.
Brandon and Kelly’s wedding was apparently the plan
Priestley’s exit also derailed plans for Brandon and Kelly Taylor to marry. On the podcast, he said he believed that was “the overall plan,” confirming the obvious thing the show had been circling for years: Brandon and Kelly were not just another pairing. They were the endgame-shaped shadow hanging over every other relationship.
Kelly, played by Garth, had already been through enough romantic turbulence to qualify for her own emotional insurance policy. She had been part of the show’s central love triangle with Brandon and Dylan McKay, played by Luke Perry, and the question of which Walsh twin-adjacent romance would ultimately prevail had been baked into the series mythology for years.
Instead, Brandon disappeared to Washington, Kelly remained in Beverly Hills, and the wedding became one more alternate-universe 90210 storyline. The show carried on, but Garth told Priestley that his absence changed the chemistry in a fundamental way.
“You were so missed with your presence, because, you know, we didn’t have Brenda or Brandon anymore,” she said.
That sentence neatly explains why the original series could continue without ever quite replacing its original center. Brenda and Brandon were not simply two characters who could be swapped out when the cast evolved. They were the show’s organizing principle: the twins who arrived as outsiders, narrated the rules of Beverly Hills and gave the audience a way into its glossy, ridiculous universe.
The soap opera was the point—until it wasn’t
There is a delicious irony in Priestley’s complaint. The outrageousness he found exhausting is also what made 90210 so enduring. The show began as a relatively polished teen drama about class, friendship and adolescence, then gradually embraced the melodrama that helped turn it into a cultural event. The bigger the hair, the messier the romances and the more improbable the plot twist, the more the series became the thing people remembered.
But there is a difference between enjoying the chaos from the couch and having to deliver it with a straight face for ten seasons. Priestley’s frustration sounds less like contempt for the show than exhaustion with its inability to recognize that a story can end before the audience starts asking whether everyone has secretly been replaced by an identical cousin.
Spelling saw a television institution that still had life in it. Priestley saw a beloved character approaching the point of no return. Both instincts turned out to be understandable. 90210 did keep going, and it did end only a year and a half after Brandon left. But Priestley’s timing also gave the show one final piece of mythology: the star who asked for a clean ending, was denied it, and walked away just before the finale came into view.
In the end, Brandon never got his wedding, Priestley never got his tidy wrap-up, and Aaron Spelling never got pulled from the set in a body bag. For a show that once made every school hallway feel like a national emergency, it is a perfectly on-brand ending.
Jenny McCarthy Says Tom Cruise’s Wedding Guest List Came With a Scientology Recruitment Pitch
Nearly 20 years after Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes’ Italian castle wedding, McCarthy is revisiting the baby handoff, the “Scientology stare” and the strange pressure she says followed her home.
Some wedding memories age into warm little anecdotes: the bad dancing, the too-long speeches, the uncle who discovered the open bar. Jenny McCarthy’s memory of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes’ 2006 wedding has taken a far more sinister route.
On a new episode of The Jenny McCarthy Wahlberg Show, McCarthy revisited the wedding weekend while speaking with former Scientologist Anne Gollert Hill. Her story, as told on the podcast and reported by Perez Hilton, involves an Italian castle, a newborn Suri Cruise, David Miscavige delivering a lengthy ceremony speech and what McCarthy describes as an unmistakable effort to pull both her and then-boyfriend Jim Carrey into Cruise’s religious orbit.
It is an extremely 2006 Hollywood story: the biggest movie star on earth, a glamorous young bride, a baby everyone wanted to see and a wedding guest list that apparently felt less like a romantic celebration than a very expensive closed-door networking event.
The baby handoff that allegedly changed the mood
McCarthy said she attended the rehearsal dinner with Carrey and was seated directly across from Cruise and Holmes. Holmes had recently given birth to Suri, who was reportedly brought into the room by a nanny during dinner.
McCarthy asked whether she could hold the baby. That should be one of the easiest social exchanges in the world: “Would you like to hold the baby?” “Sure.” Tiny fingers. Polite cooing. Someone asks where the dessert is.
Instead, McCarthy says the room suddenly felt intensely uncomfortable. “It looked like Rosemary’s Baby,” she recalled, saying she got what she called the “Scientology stare.” According to her account, conversation stopped while Holmes slowly passed Suri to her. McCarthy said she greeted the baby, then handed her back, at which point the room resumed as if nothing strange had happened.
“I thought to myself, ‘OK, I am in the belly of the beast right now,’” McCarthy said, describing the experience as the most frightened she had ever felt.
That is a remarkable description for a rehearsal dinner, but it also explains why this anecdote is landing now. The moment is intimate, cinematic and just ambiguous enough to invite the internet to replay it like a scene from a prestige thriller. No dramatic confrontation is alleged. No one storms out. There is simply a baby, a room full of famous people and one guest who says the atmosphere flipped when she reached for the child.
Then David Miscavige walked into the wedding story
McCarthy also recalled meeting David Miscavige, the leader of the Church of Scientology, after Cruise introduced him as his best man. The former Singled Out host said she joked, “Haha you got picked, congratulations,” and believed the remark landed badly.
According to McCarthy, Miscavige did not appreciate the joke, while Cruise laughed and tried to smooth over the awkwardness. She also said Miscavige gave a roughly 30-minute speech during the ceremony and remembered Holmes appearing to work hard to maintain a smile through it.
The wedding itself took place in November 2006 at the Odescalchi Castle outside Rome, a setting so lavish it practically arrives with its own orchestral score. Cruise and Holmes had become one of the defining celebrity couples of the era: the global superstar and the former Dawson’s Creek sweetheart, with their relationship moving at a pace that kept tabloids permanently breathless.
Cruise’s public association with Scientology was already a major part of his celebrity mythology by then. Miscavige’s presence made the wedding feel, from the outside, like more than a private family occasion. McCarthy’s account adds a guest-level view of that atmosphere, though it remains her recollection of events from two decades ago, not a scene independently documented in the source.
McCarthy says Holmes seemed different after the wedding
The more loaded part of McCarthy’s story comes after the castle, when she says Cruise and Holmes continued visiting the home she shared with Carrey.
McCarthy said she would pull Holmes aside and ask, “You good, girl? Do you need any help?” She recalled Holmes as looking like a “deer in headlights” around the wedding, then said she noticed a shift in her as the marriage progressed. “During the wedding part, she still seemed like Katie,” McCarthy said. “Into the marriage, she seemed like [there was a] shift in her.”
Holmes filed for divorce in 2012 after roughly five years of marriage. The split became one of the most closely watched celebrity divorces of the decade, not least because of the couple’s public profile, their daughter and the long-running fascination with Cruise’s ties to Scientology. Holmes has largely kept her life with Suri out of the tabloid-performance machine, while Cruise has continued to operate at blockbuster altitude, turning every premiere into a reminder that his fame remains unusually durable.
McCarthy’s recollection also includes a secondhand claim about Carrey. She said Carrey believed Cruise had repeatedly attempted to bring him into Scientology, including invitations to the couple’s Aspen home. McCarthy recalled Carrey telling her they could not accept because he thought they would be “lured in,” and that Cruise had tried before and continued trying.
Neither Cruise nor Holmes has responded to this retelling in the source. McCarthy is presenting the memories as her own experience, alongside what she says Carrey told her at the time. That distinction matters, but it does not make the story any less culturally potent. Celebrity weddings are supposed to freeze a couple at their most glamorous. This one has spent the last 20 years collecting darker interpretations: the sudden fame rush, the unusual power dynamics, the intensely managed public image and the question of what guests actually saw when the cameras were gone.
McCarthy’s version turns one of Hollywood’s most photographed weddings into something more claustrophobic. The castle remains gorgeous. The guest list remains legendary. But now there is also the image of a room going quiet while a new mother passes her baby to a guest, everyone watching, and then carrying on as though nothing happened.
That is not the kind of wedding story people tell over brunch unless they are prepared for the table to stop eating.
Russell Wilson Is Treating Ciara’s Baby Bump Like the Main Character
The couple’s late summer photo dump serves up couch cuddles, cheek kisses and one very chic bathroom-mirror bump reveal.
Russell Wilson has entered his affectionate husband era with the enthusiasm of a man who has just discovered that a pregnant wife can, in fact, be kissed more than once per photo dump. In a new carousel, the NFL star is all over Ciara: leaning into her on the couch, kissing her cheek, and generally making her growing baby bump look like the most important celebrity accessory of the season.
Ciara posted the snapshots with the breezy caption, “Is it too late to do a summer recap?:).” The answer, apparently, is no—especially when the recap includes romance, maternity style, a low-key bathroom selfie and the kind of domestic sweetness that makes the internet briefly remember that celebrity couples can simply enjoy each other.
The kiss cam has relocated to Ciara’s living room
The most instantly shareable image shows Wilson stretched across a couch with his head resting in Ciara’s lap. She sits beside him in black, looking down at her husband, while he appears perfectly content to occupy the prime real estate usually reserved for a designer handbag or a very spoiled house pet.
Then comes the cheek-kiss selfie: Ciara smiles toward the camera in a white shirt and baseball cap, layered necklaces catching the light, while Wilson leans in wearing dark sunglasses. It is playful, casual and unmistakably couple-y without looking overly staged. The general message is less “look at our perfect life” than “yes, he is still kissing me; no, he has not run out of material.”
Fans responded in the comments with the kind of enthusiastic approval usually reserved for a friend’s engagement announcement or a particularly good vacation carousel. One wrote, “Love your life soooo much.” Another called Ciara “MOTHERara,” while a third praised the couple’s “beautiful family.” The tone was warm, delighted and very much on board with Wilson’s ongoing campaign to make public affection his personal brand.
Ciara’s maternity wardrobe is doing more than supporting the plot
The romance may be the headline, but Ciara’s pregnancy style gets its own subplot. In one mirror photo, she poses in a fitted black sleeveless top and matching leggings, holding a hairbrush as if she has paused mid-routine to casually document the bump. It is a very Ciara kind of maternity moment: streamlined, unfussy and polished without looking like it required a production meeting.
The outfit also gives the carousel a useful visual rhythm. There is the intimate couch shot, the direct bump reveal, the cheek-kiss selfie and then a black-and-white party throwback of Ciara dancing with a friend. In other words, the post moves from homebody tenderness to pregnancy glamour to social-life nostalgia, all under the loose umbrella of a summer recap.
That balance is what makes the post feel more personal than a standard pregnancy announcement. Ciara is not presenting motherhood as a standalone campaign or turning every frame into a formal portrait. She is folding it into the rest of her life: her relationship, her clothes, her memories, her family and the apparently ongoing question of whether Wilson can be physically separated from her for longer than a few seconds.
A new chapter for a very public family
Ciara and Wilson married in July 2016, and the couple announced their fourth child together in August 2026. They already share three children: Sienna Princess, Win Harrison and Amora Princess. Ciara also has a son, Future Zahir, from her previous relationship with rapper Future.
That history gives the carousel more weight than a simple romantic soft launch—though the romance is certainly doing plenty of work. This is a family already familiar with public milestones, and the latest update places the pregnancy inside an established partnership rather than presenting it as a sudden plot twist. Wilson’s affection reads as part celebration, part everyday ritual, and part very deliberate reminder that he is thrilled to be along for the ride.
There is also something refreshingly low-stakes about the whole presentation. No dramatic announcement language appears in the caption. No grand statement is needed. The pregnancy is already known, and the carousel is allowed to be a collection of moments: a husband on a couch, a bump in a mirror, a kiss in sunglasses, a friend dancing in a throwback frame. The result feels less like a press release and more like someone scrolling through their camera roll and deciding the public can have a few favorites.
That may be why the post lands so neatly. Celebrity pregnancy content can veer toward spectacle very quickly, but Ciara keeps this one grounded in familiar social-media grammar: summer memories, casual outfits, a mirror photo, a partner who cannot stop reaching for her. The glamour is there, but so is the ordinary intimacy.
And Wilson’s contribution is impossible to miss. Plenty of celebrity husbands appear in pregnancy posts looking supportive, proud and carefully positioned. Wilson appears to have chosen a more tactile strategy: lie across her lap, kiss her cheek, admire the bump and repeat as necessary. If the couple’s next update contains another cuddle, another kiss or another glimpse of Ciara turning maternity dressing into a full fashion category, the internet will not be shocked. It will probably just ask whether Wilson has finally given her personal space.