How Shannen Doherty Powered Through Her Dramatic Exits From Beverly Hills 90210 and Charmed

For the pre-Internet era, Shannen Doherty was the target of quite the media frenzy.

Once Beverly Hills, 90210 became a zeitgeist-dominating, stars-on-every-magazine-cover, undeniable hit, tabloids started buzzing about trouble on the set.

Take your pick, the ensemble was full of hot young thangs (with Luke Perry considered the breakout heartthrob), but most of the scuttlebutt centered on the Fox show's female leads. And soon the gossip singled out Doherty, who was rumored to be that Hollywood catch-all known as difficult.

"I'm not saying I don't have my moments of bitchiness, because everybody has them, but it's never for no reason," Doherty told People in 1993. "I've always been a ballsy kid. I know it pisses some people off, but isn't the end result much better?"

The actress and animal rights activist, who died July 13 after a long battle with cancer, acknowledged some years later that she definitely made mistakes. But in a culture that loves to punish as much as idolize, Doherty inevitably ended up as the mid-'90s poster girl for bad behavior.

And it was a really big deal when she left 90210 in 1994.

"I quit," Doherty said in the Jan. 23, 1994, issue of TV Guide, her interview teed up to cut bad press off at the pass far ahead of the season finale on May 25 that would also serve as Brenda Walsh's send-off. She called it a "mutual decision" between her and executive producer Aaron Spelling.

"We backed each other against the wall," she explained. "I feel no sadness. Who wants to get up at 5 a.m. and leave the arms of your husband and go work for 12 hours in a job in which you're miserable?" 

The Memphis, Tenn., native, whose pre-90210 resume included a slew of TV and the cult-classic Heathers, added, "When I started the show, all I cared about was my career. Now I care about being with my husband. I take my marriage seriously." (Doherty, then 22, had been married to actor Ashley Hamilton, 19, for three months; she filed for divorce that April.)

Still, the narrative persisted that Doherty had been fired four seasons into her run as Minnesota transplant Brenda, the fraternal twin of Jason Priestley's Brandon Walsh, not least in part because co-star Tori Spelling wanted it so. And since Aaron Spelling happened to be her dad, so it went.

"Shannen knows why she will not be on the show next year," the producer's daughter cryptically told TV Guide at the time.

But Spelling, only 19 when that drama unfolded, came to regret her role in Doherty's ouster.

"I felt like I was a part of something, a movement, that cost someone their livelihood," she said in 2015 on Tori Spelling: Celebrity Lie Detector, reflecting on what happened with Doherty. "Was she a horrible person? No. She was one of the best friends I ever had."

There was toxicity on the set, Spelling and Jennie Garth agreed on the July 17, 2023, episode of their podcast, 90210MG, as they rehashed Doherty's final episode of the seminal series. But maybe if they'd all just gone to their respective corners and let cooler heads prevail, they noted, Brenda wouldn't have had to leave to study acting in London after all.

But in the '90s, Doherty's fiery rep was set for the duration, only to be further cemented when her time on Charmed also ended after only three seasons but the show (another Spelling Television production) carried on for five more years.

"There was too much drama on the set and not enough passion for the work," Doherty told Entertainment Tonight in May 2001. "You know, I'm 30 years old and I don't have time for drama in my life anymore."

And, so it goes, co-star Alyssa Milano (who enlisted TV sisters Doherty and Holly Marie Combs as bridesmaids when she wed her first husband in 1999), later regretted that tensions rose as high as they did.

"I think a lot of our struggle came from feeling that I was in competition, rather than it being that sisterhood that the show was so much about," Milano told ET in 2021. "And I have some guilt about my part in that."

Doherty was a "great actress, loves her family so much," she added, "and I just wish I could've felt strong enough in who I was to recognize that back then."

And that's the thing: Doherty, despite her admitted immature missteps, was strong—and not afraid to flex her muscle—before it was fashionable to be so.

"If you consider 'difficult' being a strong woman who sticks up for herself, yeah, I admit to it," Doherty told Rolling Stone in 1992. "I'm open to different ideas, but if you get on my bad side and don't listen to me and you don't treat me with as much respect as you treat a man, you've got a problem."

She had tested the waters early, pushing back against a proposed plot about Brenda wanting to drop a few pounds from her already petite frame because Doherty didn't want to negatively influence her young fans amid an epidemic of eating disorders. 

The idea was scrapped, and not an advance in thinking too soon for a time in which the star's hair color wasn't immune to stereotypes.

"This receptionist told me, 'What you have done for brunettes is amazing,'" Doherty told Rolling Stone. "'It's always the blondes that get the guy, who have the wonderful life, who are perceived as the most beautiful one. And you have totally turned it around.'"

As for the overall vibe among the co-stars, Doherty noted, "I'm not going to lie and say that everybody is buddy-buddy. You argue about things, and yeah, we make up in the end. It's kind of like a brother-sister deal."

Well, Garth described their dynamic in her 2014 memoir as "gasoline and a match." And Priestley wrote of his TV sister in his memoir that year, "She really and truly did not give a s--t. It was a very cool attitude, until it wasn't."

In hindsight, Doherty looked at her rocky tenure on Beverly Hills, 90210 as a stepping stone to the woman she became, a woman who shared many fiery traits with her younger self but was naturally much wiser.

"I thought that being a woman and being young, in order to be heard I had to be very strong and overbearing and loud and get my point across, and if somebody didn't agree with me, it just meant I had to get harder with it," she told CNN in 2010. "Now I do the opposite. I erase the fact that I'm a woman, and I'm not a victim anymore because I'm happy being a woman, and I think it's actually going to get me further."

Explaining the road that led her to write her book Badass: A Hard-Earned Guide to Living Life with Style and (the Right) Attitude, Doherty said, "I'm still a work in progress because I'm still making mistakes. Badasses will always make mistakes. It's just not repeating those mistakes, and hopefully they're not as horrifying and shameful as some of the earlier mistakes of my youth.

"To be a true badass," she added, "you're going to make mistakes because you're constantly evolving, constantly growing and constantly learning new things."

And in addition to allowing for personal growth, time tends to heal a lot of wounds—or at least enough scar tissue forms to protect those wounds from opening up again. 

After reprising the role of Brenda on the CW's 90210 alongside Garth as Kelly Taylor, Doherty told CNN that they had "really connected as women now that we're older. We've both grown up, and we realized that we like each other. We found a great new relationship within each other."

After much discussion over the years about a possible reboot, all of the original Beverly Hills, 90210 stars—minus Perry, who died in 2019—reunited for the limited meta-series BH90210. Doherty, forever linked to Perry thanks to the canonical teen love between Brenda and Dylan, also guest-starred on Riverdale when the series was forced to say goodbye to his character, Archie's dad Fred Andrews. 

But suffice it to say, 25 years after Doherty was first expelled from the zip code that made her famous, none of what went down then mattered in the slightest.

Doherty went public with her breast cancer battle in 2015 when details of her condition were included in a lawsuit she had filed over insurance coverage. She went into remission but shared in February 2020 that the cancer had returned and was categorized as stage four. 

It turned out she had been fighting the disease for more than a year, including during filming of BH90210, but she had kept the diagnosis private.

"I thought, when I finally do come out, I will have worked and worked 16 hours a day," Doherty told Good Morning America, "and people can look at that and say, 'Oh my God. Yeah, she can work and other people with stage four can work, too.' Our life doesn't end the minute we get that diagnosis. We still have some living to do."

Later that year, Garth and Spelling told E! News that they were in touch but giving Doherty her space.

"I just check in on her once in a while and I definitely follow along on her stories to see and check in and see how she is," Garth said. "She keeps a really tight circle of very close people and I think that's the way to do it."

But, Garth added, "She seems to be really doing well and thriving, and helping a lot of people through the process."

Said Spelling, "I check in with her, too...and she knows we're here if she needs us or even just to have a good laugh."

In a dispiriting turn of events, Doherty shared in June 2023 that the cancer had spread to her brain and she had undergone surgery in January to have a tumor removed, followed by an update in November that the cancer had spread to her bones.

But even amid such draining health challenges that admittedly scared her, Doherty couldn't help but project an image of strength, continuing to share snaps from her life enjoying time outdoors and surrounded by friends.

She had filed for divorce from her third husband, photographer Kurt Iswarienko, in April after 11 years of marriage, her rep telling TMZ the actress had not wanted to go that route but "felt she was left with no other option."

Doherty posted a not-wildly-cryptic note on Instagram April 21: "The only people who deserve to be in your life are the ones who treat you with love, kindness and total respect."

In the final months of her life, those who'd seen up close and personal how Doherty operated—confidently, defiantly and with her whole heart—continued to have great hope that she'd pull through.

"She's resilient," Brian Austin Green—a favorite of Doherty's since their early days working together—told E! News in September 2023. "I mean, if anybody that I know is going to have to deal with what she's dealing with, she's the one that can get through it."

And there's nothing like matters of life and death to make drama on the set of a TV show seem like the most insignificant thing in the world. Which Doherty, ironically, seemed to already know as she was living it.

"I'm putting a lot of emphasis on my personal life right now," she told Rolling Stone in 1992, "because when it all goes downhill and you lose all your popularity, there's got to be somebody else there."

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