And now an article about a Saved By The Bell movie written by a guy who’s seen one episode

So Lifetime is going to make a behind-the-scenes movie about Saved By The Bell. If you go to Buzzfeed, you can look at some of the people who are going to be in the movie as “Popular Guy Who Talks To The Camera” and “Tiffani-Amber Thiessen” and “Screech.” They are all young people, because the people who were in Saved By The Bell are all old now. You’re old now, too. That’s how this works.

But let’s not beat around the bush here. This is the part where we’d make some sort of joke about “Bayside High!” or “Mr. Belding!” or “I’m so excited!” but we don’t really know what those references mean, because we’ve only seen one episode of Saved By The Bell, even though we are of the right age to have been in the prime Saved By The Bell watching demographic at the show’s height of popularity. To be fair, the only episode we’ve seen is one we’ve seen three times for some strange, cosmic reason. (If this were a novel, there would be a message buried inside of it 10-year-old us was supposed to decode but was too stupid to comprehend.) It’s the one where Zack dates the girl in the wheelchair. So unless this movie is specifically the behind the scenes story of that episode, we are useless, except in the most superficial of ways.

But, really, isn’t everyone just a little bit useless? The increased mechanization of human society means that, eventually, the vast majority of our tasks will be performed by robots. In a few decades, we might even have an A.V. Club robot, who generates Newswires for you to have a chuckle at over your morning coffee, and Lifetime might have a series of actor robots who will perform a movie of the behind the scenes experience on the behind the scenes Saved By The Bell movie. The point is this: Even banks are worried about your long-term employment status when that happens. We will have so much leisure, and so little original thought. We will be trapped in a never-ending cycle of our own delusions, fed and fattened by robots who secretly despise us. We will be nothing without meaningful work, and we will spend all of our time worrying what the robots will think of us, just as Zack worried about what the other kids would think about him when he dated the girl in the wheelchair.

There are three things we know in this life to be true: Matter decays, everything is fallible, and people (but not Dustin Diamond) had a lot of sex behind the scenes of Saved By The Bell, according to several anonymous interview subjects and a book written by Dustin Diamond, which makes the making of the show a solid candidate for a TV movie. Life is an endless cycle of meaninglessness giving way to meaning. You may think yourself good, but you’re just a little bit evil. There were threesomes going on all of the time on the set of Saved By The Bell. Don’t you want to see that? We know we do, but only if it’s about that one episode. You know. The one where Zack dated the girl in the wheelchair.

[His position as TV Editor revealed to have been a fraud all along, since he had not seen all of Saved By The Bell and did not plan to review every episode of it for TV Club Classic, Todd VanDerWerff was summarily removed from the premises.]