Go to Class, Learn Something: Dennis Haskins, 1950-2026

I was born in 1976. My younger sister was born in 1980. That’s not a huge difference chronologically, but I’m constantly amazed by the pop culture gulf between us. Saved by the Bell is a cultural touchstone for her generation, and I’d rather watch Zack Morris Is Trash. Which, you know, he is. Therefore I’m afraid I’m not as moved by the death of Dennis Haskins as I know a lot of other people are. He doesn’t seem to have been a bad guy, but this is not one of the celebrity deaths of this year that’s left me shaken. Except for the part where I wrote less than a week ago about cast members’ growing old and dying.

Now, of course, Principal Belding was the sole adult on the show for a large amount of its run. Oh, he started out on Good Morning, Miss Bliss, which was really more about the eponymous Miss Bliss as played by Hayley Mills. I’ve never watched that show, but it’s obvious it focused more on the adults than the kids inasmuch as there are multiple credited adults as recurring characters. I don’t know how they move Belding from junior high to high school, but since they retooled the show so much that they moved the setting from Indianapolis to LA, I’m not sure how much it mattered.

The focus on the new version was the children, but they made Belding the authority figure. I’m not sure we ever see any of the characters’ parents—I haven’t watched a full episode in decades, so I could be wrong—but there’s a reason one of the things I can say in Latin is in loco parentis. Belding serves as a parental replacement. But the “wait until your father gets home” kind, not the one you’d go to if you had any kind of problem you actually wanted help with. Honestly it’s one of the problems I have with the show; Zack has too many foils.

On a better show, the character could have been better developed, and I feel sure that Haskins could have done well at it. It’s not difficult to imagine a Belding who’s akin to who Max was in the earlier episodes, someone the kids could bring their problems to. Especially Jessie, the only character I mostly liked, who was smart enough to be the one he would seemingly want to mentor. But the show decided that she’d be more of Zack’s circle instead of being supported by the faculty.

After the show went off the air, he remained a staple for Millennials. Or, cynically, for Gen-Xers who wanted to draw Millennial viewership. And it’s true that a lot of the Xers are more cuspy, like me, and possibly have younger siblings on the other side of the divide. Haskins was also the only cast member to appear on pretty much every property in the series, the only cast member to appear on every episode of the sequel series. Say what you want about the typecasting; at least it kept the bills paid.