The cast of Beverly Hills, 90210 isn’t cashing in as much as you’d think with Fox’s meta “revival.”
Sources tell The Hollywood Reporter that original stars Jennie Garth, Tori Spelling, Gabrielle Carteris, Shannen Doherty, Jason Priestley, Brian Austin Green and Ian Ziering are making $70,000 per episode for Fox’s BH90210, where they each play heightened versions of themselves shopping a revival of their beloved former ’90s teen soap. That translates to a $420,000 base salary for the six-episode “event series.”
Sources note that Garth and Spelling also receive an additional $15,000 per-episode fee for co-creating the new take. (Showrunners Mike Chessler and Chris Alberghini are also credited as co-creators alongside Garth and Spelling.)
Priestley, who helmed one episode, is earning an additional $46,000 for his work behind the camera. (That’s the basic DGA primetime network directing rate.)
The new salaries are a far cry from what many industry insiders anticipated for a pseudo-reboot of a beloved series with nearly the full cast participating. “I thought they would have made at least six figures,” said one prolific talent agent.
By comparison, the four original stars of Will & Grace were paid $250,000 per episode for the first season of NBC’s revival and secured bumps to $350,000 for seasons two and three.
According to a 2017 THR survey, actor salaries ranged from $1 million per episode (think the stars of The Big Bang Theory) to $55,000-$85,000 for midrange talent (actors lower down on the call sheet), with the bottom level for supporting leads with no prior series regular roles coming in at around $30,000 per episode.
BH90210 premiered Aug. 7 on Fox and opened with an impressive 1.5 rating in the all-important adults 18-49 demographic and 3.4 million total viewers, besting CBS stalwart Big Brother in both metrics. The series also scored well with women 25-54, drawing a 2.5 in the demo — Fox’s best summer scripted return in nearly a decade. With three days of delayed viewing, the series premiere grew to a 2.1 among 18-49ers, making it this summer’s highest-rated series debut and No. 1 summer bow in more than two years. All told, the episode delivered 6.1 million multiplatform viewers and ranks as Fox’s most-streamed summer debut ever.
As for the future, the castmembers all hope that BH90210 runs for multiple seasons. “We have so many stories to tell that this could keep going on season after season,” said Spelling, who with Garth had been shopping the new take for nearly a year before the newly independent Fox Entertainment came through with the series order.
Fox and producers CBS TV Studios — the latter of which produced the original series — declined comment.
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