We're Saved By The Bell

I'M SCREAMING Saved By The Bell brought back the caffeine pills pic.twitter.com/PJTI66NXuB

— Walt (@UberKryptonian) August 10, 2020

Entertainment Weekly spilled that Elizabeth Berkley Lauren (the face behind Jessie Spano) will be featured often in the 90s sitcom reboot as a guidance counselor in the reboot premiering on Peacock. Mario Lopez is also set to make a comeback as A.C. Slater (the high school's gym teacher), as well as Mark-Paul Gosselaar and Tiffani Thiessen (Kelly Kapowski) in recurring roles.

The new plot of the rebooted Saved By The Bellrevolves around a new group of Bayside High School students from "overprivileged" and working-class families, among the latter of which were transferred to the school as part of a plan by now-California Governor Zack Morris (Gosselaar)—whose administration experiences controversy for closing too many low-income high schools—to send lower-income students to the highest-performing schools in the state.

Berkley Lauren revealed the inspiration behind the teaser, saying:

"The teaser is from a really great episode that pays homage to that moment where Jessie still has some interesting feelings about that time. Of course, one of the most loved episodes is the 'I'm so excited' caffeine pill episode — and to this day, people still come up to me and say those three words."

The New Kids On The Block 

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coming soon

A post shared by josie totah (@josietotah) on Aug 10, 2020 at 12:31pm PDT

New additions to the show include Josie Totah, John Michael Higgins, Haskiri Velazquez, Mitchell Hoog, Alycia Pascual-Pena, Belmont Cameli and Dexter Darden.

Totah gave some insight about her character Lexi and how people like her are represented on television, revealing:

"Getting to play a transgender role on screen is obviously very rare. There's almost zero representation of people in the trans community. Growing up as a young trans girl, I feel that never seeing myself [on TV] made me never feel truly accepted by the world. She's in theater, evil, and the most popular girl in school — she just happens to be transgender and I feel that getting to that is an incredible opportunity and I can't wait for people to see themselves on screen in that way."

Pascual-Pena also revealed her favorite part of being a part of the show, saying:

"Mario is one of the first Latinos that we saw on screen, and it's one of the reasons that I love the show.And Lisa [Lark Voorhies] was one of the first multi-dimensional black women that we saw on the show. I really have so much love and admiration for this show because we get to progress conversations that need to really be discussed in a transparent forum. I think the show deals with these issues in such a beautiful way, specifically in my experience getting to play an Afro-Latina is such a blessing. For most of my life as an actress in this industry, there were never roles written from my experience and I deal with the erasure of my experience in my community within television and film — so, I really have to pay my dues. I have so much love for [creator] Tracey [Wigfield], and to [Executive Producer] Franco [Bario] for essentially rewriting this role and making little girls and women, and a community that looks like me, speaks my language — as an immigrant's first language Spanish — is honestly one of my favorite parts of being a part of the show."

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Friends forever...

A post shared by Mario Lopez (@mariolopez) on Apr 20, 2019 at 9:35pm PDT

The original version of Saved By The Bellrevolved around a group of high school friends and their principal, placing emphasis on both lighthearted comedic situations and serious social issues such as drug use, driving under the influence, homelessness, remarriage, death, women's rights and environmental issues.

New addition Dexter Darden is excited to see how the charm of the original series will blend in with the issues that are going on today in the Peacock reboot, saying:

"Originally, Saved by the Bell was one of the few shows that showed racial diversity in general. We weren't used to seeing Black women who were on a show with white women and white men who were on the show with a Latino man. And so to be able to bring that back and really cross racial boundaries and generations and show that inclusivity is important and that everybody has different colors, different races, different genders, can all do the same job equally. It's great having all individual communities represented on the show. We have Josie on the show who is putting the transgender community on her shoulders and trying to bring that to a new light. It's special for us to be a part of it."