Social media didn’t invent parasocial relationships. Long before the introduction of Facebook, Myspace or Friendster, Saved By the Bell shippers wanted to punish anyone who got between high school lovebirds Zack Morris and Kelly Kapowski.
That includes Patrick Muldoon, who played Jeffrey Hunter, the dreamy manager of teen hangout The Max in Season Three of Saved by the Bell. Even though Kelly was a) a high school student and b) his employee, Jeff had no problem moving in for a make-out session when no one else was around.
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Jeff proved himself to be even skeezier when Zack, Slater and Screech caught him making out with another girl at The Attic, an over-18 club catering to promiscuous hunks and bodacious babes. Kelly eventually catches him in the act as well, furious that she broke up with a swell guy like Zack to date such an a-hole.
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More than 30 years after his last episode aired, Muldoon is still catching grief for messing with Kelly and Zack. “There’s no week that goes by that I don’t get at least, I’d say, one to three messages on Instagram,” Muldoon admitted this week on Tori Spelling’s MisSPELLING podcast, via Entertainment Weekly.
“It doesn’t matter what my post is,” Muldoon continued. “It’s like, ‘That’s that son of a bitch who stole Kelly from Zack. I hate him!’ And then someone will join in, ‘I hate him too. You ruined my childhood!’”
The actor says he was warned. When he was cast as Jeff, Saved by the Bell producer Peter Engel told Muldoon, “Just so you know, for our fan base, this is going to be a big deal. We’re taking a chance here.”
“Slowly over these 30 years,” Muldoon said on Today in 2021, “I have realized what he meant.”
“I really didn’t realize how much people had an affection for Kelly and Zack and how serious they were about it,” Muldoon confessed. “The reaction from the audience was not favorable, you know, and strong.”
Another thing that caught Muldoon by surprise: He had assumed Saved by the Bell was a Saturday-morning kid show watched solely by tweens. He found out differently. “I was early 20s and all my friends were like, ‘Dude, you dog, you dog, you stole Kelly from Zack, you piece of shit.’”
These days, Muldoon has two ways of dealing with irate fans. If they’re rude, he tells them, “She loved it.” But the actor rarely plays that card. Instead, “I usually say, ‘I was just trying to spice up their relationship. I did it for Kelly and Zack. So Zack sees how valuable Kelly is.’”
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