“Saved By The Bell” is set to honour its late star, Dustin Diamond.
Ahead of the upcoming second season of the W Network reboot, the series will pay tribute to the late actor, who died in February following a long battle with cancer.
While Diamond did not appear in the rebooted series, showrunner Tracey Wigfield told Variety that though she never met Diamond, she “knew we wanted to do more than just putting a picture of him up at the end.”
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Executive producer Franco Bario told the outlet that he had even spoken to Diamond about “possible stories that would include him in Season 2” prior to his death.
“At the beginning of this season, we already were coming into writing Season 2 [where] obviously Dustin was one thing, but we also were like in a pandemic and in general in the first episode, everyone was feeling the same sense of everyone understands how heavy this last year has been,” she said. “It would have been wrong to not acknowledge that in a real way and to not have our OG characters mourning this character that we’ll never get to see again.”
She added, “There was a real guy who had people who loved him. You don’t want to make any jokes or talk about it in any way that might hurt anyone’s feelings.”
Mark-Paul Gosselaar, Tiffani Thiessen, Mario Lopez, Elizabeth Berkley and Lark Voorhies were also “keen to do something,” according to Wigfield.
Diamond starred as Screech on all four seasons of “Saved By The Bell” and went on to star in spinoffs “The College Years” (1993-94) and “The New Class” (1993-2000).
Season two of the “Saved By The Bell” reboot premieres on Nov. 25 at 8 p.m. ET/PT on W Network.
