No question about it, 90210 is the most-talked-about new show of the year, and the youth-soap of the century. The question is, which century? And is it being talked about for the right reasons?

Jennie Garth plays a guidance counselor (no comment!) at West Beverly Hills High. Shannen plays her old self, now so old she’s directing the school musical, Spring Awakening, the 1891 Frank Wedekind play about teenage carnality that was 2007′s Best Musical on Broadway. But the leap from 1891 to 2007 is nothing compared to the challenge of reanimating Aaron Spelling’s 20th-century show, a hardcore habit America long since kicked. Tori Spelling says her late father always wanted to remake the show, jesting that it should be renamed Beverly Hills 90210: The Next Generation. Juno writer Diablo Cody had a snarkier suggestion: they should call it 9021-Old.

We loved the show for the backstage fracases as well as the on-camera drama, and that’s what’s been selling this time around, even before its Sept. 2 debut. Tori Spelling quit in a minute and a huff when she found she was getting paid less than Shannen and Jennie. Blinking back searing tears, Jennie told TV Guide, “I know Shannen probably doesn’t share the feelings that I have for Tori, but I love Tori like my sister.” And on the first day of shooting, Shannen and Jennie are said to have circled each other like hissy Siamese kitties, fur all afluff. Old fans will be pleased to hear they’ll soon be fighting over the same guy (who’d better shop doctors for dual Viagra scrips).

But what about young fans? To them, Shannen and Jennie seem about the same age as Jessica Walter, who brilliantly played a stoned crone on Arrested Development and plays another one on 90210. They’d consider Jennie and Shannen as the modern equivalent of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford and guess their on-set fistfights happened around the same time as the Battle of Thermopylae (if they ever heard of Bette, Joan, or Thermopylae). The new generation of Beverly Hills High kids aren’t exactly stars. You’ll note that even the rapidly cooling Hilary Duff didn’t take her rumored role as Walter’s granddaughter (Shenae Grimes did).

The pre-debut debate about the fall’s hottest show centers on Shannen and Jennie and Tori, even though the show cannot be centered on them. This is bad news. The CW is betting that the Beverly Hills High veterans will attract us in the liver-spot set and the fresh faces will draw the acne-cream market. But if I were young, I’d find the Crypt Keeper faces unrecognizable and the new ones barely less so. Then I’d watch my TiVo’d Gossip Girl and maybe even The Hills.

Maybe I’m wrong, and the show will make everyone famous, or famous again. Jessica Walter has been around, and she says, “In my — I’m sorry to say — 50 years of being in the biz, I have never been in anything that’s got buzz like this.”

I suspect everybody’s in for a crashing disappointment, at least the old fans. What we really crave is a show built around the peculiar appeal of the original show’s weird sisters, Tori, Shannen, and Jenni.

Scientific studies have proven that beauty in humans is largely a biologically determined response to symmetrical features, yet Shannen has the most startlingly asymmetrical eyes in TV history — she looks like somebody’s holding a magnet to the screen to lift one eye an inch higher. She’s beautiful and ugly at the same time. Her behavior is just ugly, onscreen and off. Her contradictions make her irritatingly irresistible.

Blonde and bland, Jennie is a less compelling presence, though she was good at Love Trigonometry 101 and perhaps she can do the same for midlife love triangles. It was Tori who was more distinctive, again because of her contradictions. She was the ugliest beauty in TV history, hired because of her last name, yet invaluably campy. And her afterlife so far has been more interesting than Jennie’s and Shannen’s. Jennie dances with the stars; Tori dances on Shannen’s grave in the reality-show competition.

Will the incoming freshman class plumb such tabloid depths and hit such giddy heights? Or will they turn out to be a pack of faceless Beverly Hills 00000′s? I can’t wait for Sept. 2 to see.