For ‘90s kids, there are few shows more iconic than Saved By the Bell. The teen sitcom debuted on NBC in 1989, quickly becoming major hit for the network and a staple of their Saturday morning TNBC lineup. Over the course of four seasons, the series followed the lives of a group of high school friends at Los Angeles’ fictional Bayside High School and delivered a fun mix of lighthearted comedy with serious, real-life teen issues. With fans invested in the lives of Zach, Kelly, Jessie, Lisa, Slater, and Screech as though they were their own friends, by the series made its way towards the end of senior year, the futures of the character was something fans eagerly wanted to find out and Saved By the Bell delivered — and in an episode airing 33 years ago, ended up creating a significant plot hole, too.
Airing on October 10, 1992, the episode “Wrestling with the Future” sees the group all dealing with various stresses about college applications and where they would be going after graduation. For Slater (Mario Lopez) in particular, things are stressful because while he’s offered a wrestling scholarship at the University of Iowa, but his father has other plans, wanting him to go West Point. With this being Saved By the Bell, some shenanigans ensue with Zack (Mark-Paul Gosselaar) trying to impersonate Slater during a visit from a congressman to help Slater out while Jessie (Elizabeth Berkley) stresses out with fear she’s been rejected from every university she applied to. The episode also featured an appearance from actor Michael Jai White as a military officer. White would later go on to play Al Simmons in 1997’s Spawn and would take a detour into DC with his portrayal of Bronze Tiger on Arrow.
By the end of the episode, things have largely worked themselves out. Slater ends up being set to go to Iowa, Jessie ends up being accepted to Columbia (though she is rejected from her dream school, the fictional Stansbury), Lisa was set for The Fashion Institute, Kelly was going to community college, Screech (who got into every school he applied to) was University of California-Berkeley bound, and Zack, despite having awful grades, got accepted to Yale thanks to his excellent SAT score. But while that seems like a pretty settled future, NBC would end up retconning the whole thing.
While Jessie would indeed end up going to Columbia (something that the 2020 Saved By the Bell reboot confirmed) and Lisa would go to FIT, just a year after “Wrestling with the Future”, NBC changed everyone else’s story. After the conclusion of Saved By the Bell, a sequel series, Saved By the Bell: The College Years debuted in 1993 and instead of sending the friends off to the universities that they’d chosen previously, they somehow all ended up at the fictional California University. As you can guess, with the group all attending the same university, many of the same types of hijinks and shenanigans that were hallmarks of Saved By the Bell continued into The College Years.
So, what happened? The College Years sort of explains it all away with the characters just choosing to go to college together (Kelly ends up transferring into Cal U after getting off their waitlist following The College Years’ pilot episode). It’s a convenient way to keep most of the main cast together for the sequel series which is likely the real reason for the swap. With Saved By the Bell having been so popular for NBC, a sequel was a given which would naturally want to include much of the original cast. The original series also spawned a spinoff, Saved By the Bell: The New Class that followed a new group of kids at Bayside, as well as two made-for-tv movies: Saved By the Bell: Hawaiian Style in 1992 and Saved By the Bell: Wedding in Las Vegas in 1994.
Changing up where most of the main characters went after Bayside may have created as plot hole between Saved By the Bell and The College Years, but it made sense. Zack going to Yale just didn’t fit, not only with the character broadly but it also didn’t work considering that it was just strange that he got accepted over someone like Jessie. It also makes sense from a continuation standpoint it just unfortunately didn’t help the continuation succeed.
While Saved By the Bell had been popular, however, Saved By the Bell: The College Years didn’t fare as well. Set up as a primetime series rather than a Saturday morning series the way the original had been, The College Years simply didn’t catch on. With only a few of the original main characters transferring over, viewers just weren’t as invested and the series was soon cancelled after one season. Wedding in Las Vegas ultimately was used to wrap up The College Years, bringing everyone back together for Zack and Kelly’s wedding. Fortunately, the series didn’t make any additional tweaks to the characters’ educational futures after The College Years. The 2020 reboot holds that the characters did indeed finish their educations at Cal U.
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