Jennie Garth
Jennie Garth is an actor, born 1972.
Kelly Taylor is a part Jennie Garth has now played across two series and an animated feature, the last of which brought Kelly back as a cartoon. That is an unusual career shape: not a role she escaped, but one she kept being invited back to.
Beverly Hills, 90210 cast her in 1990 as the rich, brittle, popular girl, a part that is usually disposable. Garth made it last by playing Kelly as someone who knew exactly how she was being read and resented it, which gave the writers somewhere to go when the show turned serious, and again when the 2008 revival brought her back as an adult.
The other thing she can do is sitcom timing, which the soap work hid. She played Valerie Tyler on What I Like About You from 2002 to 2006, and she is the straight one there, absorbing the chaos rather than generating it, which is the harder job in a two-hander.
Since then she has worked the reliable middle of American television: a country-living reality series on CMT in 2012, a memoir in 2014, Christmas movies, true-crime dramas, a game show. BH90210 in 2019 was the strangest of the lot, a series in which the cast played heightened versions of themselves, which required her to be funny about her own casting.
Movies (6)
TV (8)
Where to start with Jennie Garth
Beverly Hills, 90210 is unavoidable and you do not need all of it. The early stretch is a teen soap; the middle years are where Kelly Taylor becomes the show's most interesting person and Garth finally gets material worth having.
For the version of her that people underrate, watch What I Like About You. It is a conventional sitcom with an unconventional lead performance: Garth plays the responsible one and finds the jokes in exhaustion rather than in chaos.
90210 is worth an episode or two to see Kelly come back with authority, and BH90210 is the genuinely odd one, a show about a cast trying to make a show. For deep cuts, Biker Mice from Mars is her early voice work, Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story is Kelly Taylor as a cartoon, and Left for Dead: The Ashley Reeves Story represents the true-crime lane she works now.