Saved by the Bell is still very funny in Season 2, but it struggles balancing "whatever the hell it’s supposed to be"

The A.V. Club

"It’s hard not to watch and wonder, over and over, who it’s for," says Lisa Weidenfeld of the Peacock revival series. "Is it for aging millennials with fond memories of watching the original in reruns as a kid? Or is it for the teens of today, who are possibly less invested in what happened to Joss Whedon, whose travails are mentioned? These questions are a sign of how much this SBTB functions as a show with earnest teen-oriented plots run through a machine of ’90s and early ’00s references. By far, the characters that suffer most from this framing are the returning members of the original show. The actors are endearingly game, but the show leans on them too much in the second season, and they’re the most likely to be stranded with overly sincere plotlines. Worse, they’re stuck with the impossible juggling act of landing storylines about what it’s like to be middle-aged and still obsessed with your high school years, while simultaneously apologizing for the shortcomings of the original series and being semi-cognizant that they lived in a sitcom. It’s an emotional spectrum that often proves shaky territory, although it does offer the hilarity of A.C. Slater (Mario Lopez), incredibly disturbed, trying to piece together whether or not he had a mom, since the original show only ever mentioned his dad. But too often it means the wacky hijinks get stopped to build a slow-burn reunion romance between Jessie Spano (Elizabeth Berkley Lauren) and Slater. It’s hard to get invested in storylines like this when it means time away from Mac’s ability to bend space and time, or from a sweet exploration of one character’s first same-sex romance." ALSO: Elizabeth Berkley Lauren calls the Showgirls shout-out "a sort of healing, because comedy can help you reclaim a narrative of sorts.”