37 Years Ago, Saved By the Bell Revealed Zack Morris Was a Sociopath – Before the Show Even Aired

March 4, 2026, 2:30pm

For a generation of television fans, Saved by the Bell is an institution. The beloved teen sitcom debuted on NBC in 1989 and was quickly a hit for the network, becoming a staple of its Saturday morning lineup as it brought the lives of six friends at Los Angeles’ fictional Bayside High School into their living rooms each week as part of the network’s TNBC lineup. While the different and adventures the friends got in gave the series a mix of comedy and real-life teen issues to enjoy, it was really the characters that kept fans coming back. Be it Zack, Kelly, Jessie, Lisa, Slater, or Screech, everyone had their favorite — though Zack was arguably everyone’s favorite.

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But even though Zack was everyone’s favorite, he was also pretty problematic. It wasn’t exactly a secret; many of the show’s plots involved Zack’s schemes. It made for great entertainment and we all learned a lesson or two in the process. However, some of Zack’s machinations were beyond your basic hijinks. They took things more than a little too far and 37 years ago today, one episode revealed just how much of a sociopath Zack really is — and it happened even before the first episode of Saved by the Bell even aired.

Zack Tries to Emotionally Manipulate a Popstar in Junior High

Before Saved by the Bell, there was a sitcom that most people have forgotten about Good Morning, Miss Bliss. Later rebranded as Saved by the Bell: The Junior High Years, Good Morning, Miss Bliss was a very different show, originally airing on the Disney Channel in 1988 and 1989 for just one season. The series was centered around Hayley Mills, a teacher at John F. Kennedy Junior High in Indianapolis who is frequently put into morally difficult and complicated situations because of her work — and sometimes her students. Among those students are three familiar faces in Lisa Turtle (Lark Voorhies), Screech Powers (Dustin Diamond), and of course, Zack Morris (Mark-Paul Gosselaar). As you can guess, Zack was up to some of his same shenanigans that he’d be known for in Saved by the Bell, but there’s one that really stands out.

Airing on March 4, 1989, “Stevie” was the third to last episode of Good Morning, Miss Bliss before the series’ cancellation, and saw one of Miss Bliss’s former students, Colleen Morton (Suzanne Tara), come back to the school. This is something of a big deal, especially for the students at the school because Colleen had gone on to become the massively successful popstar Stevie — think the Saved by the Bell universe’s version of Britney Spears or maybe even Taylor Swift. The return to the school is to be the final performance of Stevie’s farewell tour so the students are hyped. This includes Zack who ends up making a bet with his classmate Nikki (Heather Hooper) that not only will he be chosen to be on stage with Stevie but he’ll kiss her, too.

To make this happen, Zack does something diabolical. He pretends to be dying, going so far as to send her a letter to that effect. It works and he’s chosen, but Miss Bliss knows how much of a liar Zack is and sees through it. She exposes him for it. He later goes to her house to apologize for what he’s done and ends up meeting an out of character Colleen. They talk about various things — including Zack’s scheme — and she kisses him on the cheek. Zack doesn’t realize until later, at the concert, that Colleen is actually Stevie and when he declares to Nikki that he kissed her, she doesn’t buy it.

While Zack is mostly foiled in his efforts to kiss Stevie, the fact that he went straight to pretending to have a fake terminal illness in order to emotionally manipulate people so that it could happen is just awful. That said, it’s also a big hint at exactly who Zack Morris is. This won’t be the first time he emotionally manipulates people for personal gain. In the grand scheme of things, it’s actually one of the more tame ones as, by the time we get to Saved by the Bell, many of his self-serving hijinks end up coming at the expense of his friends (like when he goes into business with friendship bracelets and forces Lisa to go without sleep to make as many as he can without paying her and even selling Screech as the friend that goes with the bracelet. Like I said, Zack only gets worse.) Still, Zack Morris is still one of our favorite Saved by the Bell characters. We can just all agree he’s not a good person.

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