Jessie’s Caffeine Addiction on ‘Saved By the Bell’ Was Originally Way Darker
Not many people know the Saved By the Bell episode “Jessie’s Song” by name, but they definitely know it by meme. It’s the legendary episode in which overachiever Jessie Spano’s musical and academic ambitions lead her to drug use, culminating in the infamous declaration, “I’m so excited! I’m so excited! I’m so… so… scared!”
What made this otherwise harrowing storyline so hilarious was that the addiction Jessie was battling was to caffeine pills. As producer Peter Engel pointed out in his book I Was Saved by the Bell: Stories of Life, Love and Dreams That Do Come True, “the average caffeine pill was the equivalent of a cup of coffee, if that, so we might as well have had Jessie get addicted to earl grey or breaking into the Max to snort coffee grounds.”
So why did Engel write the episode in the first place? Bribes from the orange juice lobby? Pressure from those heavies at the Seventh-Day Adventists? Too much of another upper popular in the entertainment industry in the ‘80s?
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Actually, in the episode as Engel originally wrote it, Jessie was going to be addicted to speed. “I insisted that we needed to start dealing with more important issues than we had in the past and that speed was a vehicle not only for exploring drug use but also the pressure that kids put on themselves to achieve,” he wrote, but the suits at NBC felt that was “too serious for Saturday mornings.” Engel doesn’t remember who suggested caffeine as a compromise, but NBC okayed it, so they “kept the episode virtually the same but swapped out the speed,” resulting in Bayside High’s future (sort of) valedictorian going all Requiem for a Dream on some coffee beans.
“Nevertheless, during the taping, the live audience was absorbed like never before,” Engel insisted, referring to the scene in which Jessie’s friend Zack discovers her stash and they struggle over it, which “would have been perfect if the bottle had actually contained speed,” he noted. “Kids were sitting on the edges of their seats. Many of them were tearing up. The atmosphere was very emotional, intense.”
Even if he “wasn’t pleased about” the necessity of the substitution and “we can laugh now about how silly the caffeine pills were, there’s a reason that so many young adults make a point of telling me that ‘Jessie’s Song’ was, hands down, their favorite episode,” he continued. “No one was making programming for kids like that at the time.”
He seems to have forgotten the after-school special and very special episode industrial complex, but maybe he just needs some coffee.
