Daily Times

The reboot of Beverly Hills 90210 will pay an appropriate tribute to late actor Luke Perry, CBS TV Studios president David Stapf said.

Perry, the star of hit 90’s television show Beverly Hills, 90210, passed away aged 52 last week.

According to Variety, Stapf said the actor could not be part of the reboot due to his commitment to The CW show Riverdale.

“He was going to be one of the few who was not going to be in it, because he was committed to Riverdale,” Stapf said, adding that Perry would be honoured in some way in the show, but “how we deal with that moving forward is yet to be determined.”

“That’s something the writers are going to have to figure out,” he said.

The network honcho revealed it was 90210 alum Tori Spelling who pitched the idea of the reboot.

“Tori Spelling, as she is wont to do, comes in and pitches a lot of ideas and is in our offices a lot. She kicked the idea around of ‘Wouldn’t it be fun to get the whole gang back together?'” Stapf said.

He said Spelling, who played Donna Martin on the original show, had the idea during a meeting with Ghen Maynard, the CBS head of alternative programming, “and she ran with it, literally put the entire cast together, put a fabulous pitch together with all of them and took it out, and everybody wanted it.”

Spelling had previously said that Perry would “do as many” episodes as he could work in around his Riverdale shooting schedule. The news of the reboot was officially announced by Fox last month the same day Perry was taken to the hospital after suffering a major stroke.

Published in Daily Times, March 13^th 2019.