Show played the 25-year-old love interest to Garth’s teenage character, Kelly, with their storyline something the now 62-year-old said would probably be “illegal.”
Show was a guest on the inaugural Melrose Place rewatch podcast, Still the Place, where he discussed his time on the iconic high school series.
“They cast me for Melrose Place knowing that they were going to put that character on 90210 sort of to springboard Melrose Place,” Show said on Monday’s episode. “It wasn’t the spinoff [or] any of that kind of thing. It was, like, they knew this all going in. And then I did three episodes of 90210 [as] Jake.”
As Show recalled, Jake Hanson initially came onto 90210 as a handyman hired to build “a gazebo for Kelly’s family in her backyard.” Garth then also appeared on the pilot of Melrose Place, where she shared a kiss with Show.
While the pair only kissed, their age gap — Kelly was in high school, and Jake was portrayed as a 25-year-old adult — was definitely not OK and surely would not be something written in were the series to air today.
“[It] what would now be illegal and, like, [part of the] Me Too [movement],” Show quipped. I think we only kissed, but still, you know, not good. … How odd is it that we are more, sort of, prudish now than 30 years ago?”
While Garth, now 52, played a teenager to Jake’s 25-year-old, she was over 18 in real life. As Show, 62, put it, they were “relatively contemporaries” since they were “actually both adults.”
“That’s not that crazy in real life [but] it’s knowing that it’s high school,” Show said. “Now, you put it in those terms [of the age gap], that’s creepy.”
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At the time, however, Show admits he did not think about the now-weird age difference.
“She was a grown-up, professional actress,” he said. “I didn’t really think much of it at the time we were shooting. When I watched it, I was like, ‘Oh yeah, look at that.’ … It’s different.”
Garth herself weighed in on the age gap this month her on 90210MG podcast with fellow 90210 co-star, Tori Spelling, when they interviewed Still the Place hosts, Daphne Zuniga, Laura Leighton and Courtney Thorne-Smith.
Garth said that while she hadn’t thought anything of it at the time, she too said it was “creepy now that we look back at it.”
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Overall, Show said he had fond memories of Melrose Place’s first season, despite the pilot’s “kind of corny and hokey” moments.
“For the most part, I thought it was a really solid episode,” he added, noting that later seasons of the show became vastly “different.”
Garth did not recur on Melrose Place after the pair’s May-December romance fizzled out. Her character primarily was involved in a 90210 love triangle with Brandon Walsh (Jason Priestley) and Dylan McKay, played by the late Luke Perry.
