Whatever Happened To Jennie Garth?

To answer the question posed by the title up front, nothing "happened" to Jennie Garth. Born in central Illinois in 1972, Garth and her family moved out west, first to Arizona and then to Los Angeles, where she pursued an acting career while still in her teens. In 1990, she won the biggest role of her career as troubled queen bee, Kelly Taylor, on the Fox teen drama, "Beverly Hills, 90210."

"90210" was an era-defining hit not just for the burgeoning Fox network, which positioned itself as the young, hip alternative to the Big Three, but for the young Gen-Xers and elder millennials who tuned in every week to soak up the adventures of rich, sexy high school students (even if most of the cast were well past high school age).

Garth was never a breakout star like her castmate (and occasional love interest), Luke Perry, nor was she a tabloid fixture like co-stars, Tori Spelling and Shannen Doherty. But like them, she was so associated with "90210" that it can feel like her career ended with the series' final episode in 2000. The truth, though, is that Garth has been working consistently for decades, and in her post-"90210" years she has found considerable success as an actor, writer, producer, and all-around television personality. Let's take a look at what Garth has been up to since the curtain fell on her most famous role.

But while Wall Street didn't turn out to be the best path forward, Jennie Garth found much better accommodations elsewhere in Manhattan, albeit on another network. In 2002, "What I Like About You" premiered on The WB, starring Amanda Bynes as a fun-loving suburban teen who comes to live with her uptight twenty-something sister (Garth) in New York City when their dad (Peter Scolari) moves to Japan for work. The series anchored the network's Friday night programming and was primarily a vehicle for Bynes, who had been a breakout star on the Nickelodeon sketch comedies, "All That," and "The Amanda Show."

Co-created by Wil Calhoun and Dan Schneider, the Teen Nick impresario who recently came under fire for inappropriate conduct and workplace abuses, the show was a slightly more mature role for Bynes, but it also proved to be one of the few times in her career that Garth has done and out-out comedy. She and Bynes have a natural odd-couple chemistry together, and she even got some of her old "Beverly Hills, 90210" co-stars like Perry, Ian Ziering, and Jason Priestly to pop in for an episode or two.

Seen today, the series is a reminder of how good Bynes (who hasn't had an on-screen role since 2010) can be, as well as a charming early-2000s time capsule, featuring early appearances from Abigail Breslin, Penn Badgley, and eventual "The Office" star, Jenna Fischer.

It took less than a decade for someone to have the bright idea to reboot "Beverly Hills, 90210." The half-decade or so after its last episode saw a number of successful teen soaps cut from the "90210" cloth, including "The O.C.," "Veronica Mars," and "Gossip Girl."

Developed by "Veronica Mars" creator, Rob Thomas, and airing alongside "Gossip Girl" on The CW, the reboot — simply titled "90210" – began much like the original series, with a new pair of Midwestern siblings (Shenea Grimes-Beech and Tristan Mack Wilds) moving to California and getting thrust into the dark, sexy world of Beverly Hills high school politics. The first two seasons also featured several original series alumni reprising their roles, including Shannen Doherty, Tori Spelling as good girl Donna, and Jennie Garth once again playing Kelly Taylor.

The series struggled to serve two masters: younger viewers who may not care about seeing grown-up Brenda and Donna and Kelly, and older viewers who only care about seeing Brenda and Donna and Kelly. It didn't help that those veteran cast members had badmouthed the reboot and its more sexually explicit content before it even aired, with Garth telling Entertainment Weekly (via Vulture) that "[original series producer] Aaron Spelling is rolling over in his grave right now." Eventually, "90210" gave up on trying to placate older fans; Garth, Spelling, and Doherty disappeared from the show after Season 2 and were largely never mentioned again.

The set of "Beverly Hills, 90210" sounds by all accounts like it was a never-ending crucible of hormones and egos. Feuds between stars — most notably Shannen Doherty and pretty much everyone else — made tabloid headlines throughout the 1990s, but a lot of lasting friendships were made as well. Jennie Garth and co-star Tori Spelling, daughter of series producer Aaron Spelling, were both still teenagers when the show began, and have remained close friends and collaborators ever since.

In 2014, the two put a comedic spin on their real-life friendship and shared TV history on the ABC Family comedy show, "Mystery Girls." Much like the Rob Lowe series, "The Grinder," which premiered a year later, "Mystery Girls" is about a pair of dim-bulb actresses, formerly on a hit '90s detective show, who find themselves trying to solve mysteries in real life. Despite the self-effacing premise and no shortage of "dumb blonde" jokes, the show was canceled after its first season.

Nevertheless, Garth and Spelling have continued to work together; in October 2020, on the 30th anniversary of "90210," the two premiered their behind-the-scenes podcast, "9021OMG," and appeared alongside former co-stars at the 2023 90s Con, a convention for fans of Clinton-era pop culture. They've even managed to express their friendship in the form of a "Feminine, California-chic" line of home decor items available on QVC.

"90210" — the 2000s reboot, that is — ended after five seasons in 2013, and a few years later, Jennie Garth was banging the drum in print for a new, proper reboot. This was the era when legacy shows like "Roseanne," "Will & Grace," and "Full House" were getting revival seasons that mostly centered around the original cast members. "What a great thing to do," she told Entertainment Tonight in 2017. "It would just have to be the right coming together of all the minds that need to come together."

Apparently, the minds that needed to come together to make a reboot happen were hers and Tori Spelling's. Two years later in the summer of 2019, Fox premiered "BH90210," a hall-of-mirrors reboot-parody miniseries that reunited the original cast (with one tragic exception) as heightened fictionalized versions of themselves reuniting to film a "90210" revival series.

Co-created by Garth and Spelling, "BH90210" plays to both the sincere and ironic love fans have for the original series, delighting in getting the gang back together while also staging in-universe fantasy sequences with Barbie dolls or the actors dressed as their younger selves. The show may have leaned too heavily on its meta conceits, but Garth and company were correct to recognize that these sorts of reboots are about revisiting the actors as much as the characters they played.

"BH90210" is not the first time that Jennie Garth and other members of the original cast have lampooned their own image. Even from the beginning of the series in the early 1990s, the "Beverly Hills, 90210" stars were often seen as pop culture figures first and actors second. Luke Perry famously played himself on a 1993 episode of "The Simpsons" as Krusty the Clown's half-brother, but a year earlier, Garth and the rest of the cast spoofed themselves on the Ferris Bueller-biting Fox comedy, "Parker Lewis Can't Lose." In 1995 she also starred as herself on an episode of "The Larry Sanders Show," the classic HBO showbiz satire starring Garry Shandling.

In the years since the end of the show, Garth has often been willing to poke fun at her decade in the spotlight, whether that's reviving Kelly Taylor for an episode of "Family Guy" or starring as the most insufferably touchy-feely version of herself in a 2018 episode of the Fox sitcom, "The Mick." In 2013 she reunited with Perry for an end credits gag on an episode of NBC's "Community," starring as themselves in a disastrous American knock-off of the show's "Doctor Who" parody, "Inspector Spacetime." Even her forays into reality TV like "A Little Bit Country" and the 2014 HGTV series, "The Jennie Garth Project," use her as a kind of character separate from her real self.

"Jennie Garth: A Little Bit Country" featured not only Jennie Garth but her three daughters with Peter Facinelli — Luca Bella, Lola, and Fiona. After the show ended, she raised the girls mostly out of the public eye — though an April 2023 Instagram post showing off teenage Fiona's brand-new BMW caused a small ruckus online. Middle child, Lola, made a brief appearance as a young kid in Garth's 2011 TV movie, "Accidentally in Love," but otherwise neither she nor her little sister has made any moves to follow in their parents' footsteps.

Luca Bella co-starred with Garth in the 2019 Lifetime movie, "Your Family or Your Life," playing a daughter and mother, respectively, rocked by the apparent suicide of their husband and father. At the time Garth gave some stern advice to her eldest daughter, which she later repeated in a US Weekly interview: "Don't expect to be famous. I got lucky, but you've got to do the work. You've got to put in the time."

In the years since, however, Luca Bella's ambitions have perhaps grown in a different direction than going into the family business. In May 2023, she graduated from NYU's New School with a degree in communications and has been working as an events coordinator for amFAR, the Foundation for AIDS Research. But no matter if life takes her and her sisters in front of the camera or elsewhere, her mother always has her back; "I'm glad I'm there to guide her and advise her when she wants or needs it," Garth told US Weekly.