Saved By The Bell's Tracey Wigfield Got a Little Too Into Making Zack and Kelly Kiss

Tracey Wigfield, the showrunner of Peacock's Saved By the Bell revival, stopped by Late Night with Seth Meyers and revealed that she wrote a spec movie script of the show when she was 12, but she was so into the original series that it took over her imagination in a way few other franchises can manage.

"I say this, and I feel like people think I'm stupid or something, but Saved By the Bell was really huge for me, it was like my Star Wars," she said. "That's an embarrassing thing to admit, I guess, but it's so cool to love something so much when you're a kid, and then be able to pitch your own version of it that's very much done in reverence but also a little bit poking fun at it, and it has created this situation where there's, you know, the 10-year-old inside me has too much power and is like a child tyrant running the show. I loved Zack and Kelly so much and they showed me what love is meant to be, and I was in situations this year where I'm producing a scene where I could be like 'kiss again, Zack and Kelly, do it again, kiss her longer,' or whatever, and I'm like 'what are you doing? Be an adult!'" 

Wigfield explained how this started for her. "Like a lot of people my age, I've been a fan of Saved By the Bell my whole childhood. It was just one of those shows that, for some reason, was on in repeats like 24 hours a day on six different channels all the time... My best friend Renata and I used to make funny comedy videos, because we loved SNL and stuff, and we wrote a parody Saved By the Bell movie, and when I pitched this show and started working on it and stuff, Renata sent me the script she still had of it. I was like 'oh my god, this is going to be so embarrassing, something I wrote when I was 12,' and when I read it, I was like 'you know, it's pretty good. It's like 100% better than the stuff I write now.'" 

Andy Hunsaker has a head full of sitcom gags and nerd-genre lore, and can be followed @AndyHunsaker if you're into that sort of thing.