Here's What Happened To Dustin Diamond After Saved By The Bell
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NBC announced that a Saved by the Bell reboot was coming to its Peacock streaming service with several original cast members reprising their roles. Mario Lopez was returning as A.C. Slater, along with Elizabeth Berkley as Jessie Spano, Tiffani Thiessen as Kelly Kapowski, and Zack Morris, aka The King of Bayside High, played by Mark-Paul Gosselaar. However, one person noticeably absent from the lineup was Dustin Diamond, who played Samuel "Screech" Powers.
Diamond revealed to TMZ in February 2020 that producers did not ask him to join the reboot. "Out of all the cast members, I was in... the most [episodes], and that's not the case anymore if I'm not in the new one. And how do you have Saved by the Bell without Screech, right? We should all be a part of this." How did the reboot explain his absence? A.C. told Jessie during the homecoming weekend episode, "Screech is so lucky he and Kevin [the sassy robot built and programmed by Screech] get to live on the International Space Station so he doesn't have to deal with all this," per Us Weekly.
The show ran for five seasons on NBC, ending in 1993, but the series also spawned two TV movies, Hawaiian Style and Wedding in Las Vegas, and a spin-off, The College Years, that ran for one season — and Diamond starred in them all. Of course, some time has passed since the original Saved by the Bell ended its run, but Dustin Diamond has had quite the life since then. Continue reading for more details.
Dustin Diamond released a sex tape
Dustin Diamond was not entirely done with playing Screech. In 1993, NBC decided it wanted to extend the Saved by the Bell franchise with a new show, Saved by the Bell: The New Class, with Diamond reprising his role. The show ran from 1994 to 2000, which meant that Diamond had played the same character for 13 years. After the end of The New Class, Diamond then launched a standup comedy career that ended up going nowhere.
He attempted a movie career, but most of his roles ended up being cameos with him playing himself. He also appeared on reality shows, such as Celebrity Fit Club and the UK's Celebrity Big Brother in 2013. After his film and TV career fizzled, Diamond made a perplexing career choice. In 2006, he produced a self-directed sex tape, bizarrely titled Screeched: Saved by the Smell. The X-rated video purportedly featured Diamond in a threesome with two women.
Years later, Diamond claimed he was not even the one in the sex scenes. He told Oprah Winfrey on her Where Are They Now? series, via HuffPost, that he used a "stunt double." Of the tape, he said, "I definitely got some money off of it but it definitely wasn't worth what the fallout was. People to this day look down on me. There's a lot of people [who think] 'how disgusting of you' — and I didn't really do it." Dustin Diamond followed up his sex tape with a tell-all book. Find out below how his Saved by the Bell co-stars reacted.
Dustin Diamond released the tell-all book 'Behind the Bell'
In 2009, Diamond published a book called Behind the Bell, a supposed "tell-all" autobiography and account of his time on Saved by the Bell. The book was chock-full of salacious tales and upset his fellow Saved by the Bell castmates with its claim that filming the show involved a lot of "sex, drugs and wild parties." The book's most alarming claim was that Mario Lopez had date raped a woman and that NBC paid her to keep quiet, per the New York Post. After co-stars like Gosselaar disputed the book's claims, Diamond admitted to Lopez in a 2016 Extra interview that there was little truth to Behind the Bell, with the book's ghostwriter having allegedly fabricated much of the content.
Despite Diamond's book being mostly fiction, the tell-all ended up becoming the basis for the 2014 Lifetime movie, The Unauthorized Saved by the Bell Story. Diamond noted in a 2014 interview with the AP, via Daily Herald, that "the Lifetime movie is going to be based on my book in the way that it's a behind-the-scenes look, but my book was written by a ghostwriter, and they tried to milk the negativity. It wasn't supposed to be a dirty tell-all." Ultimately, 2014 turned out to be quite a rough year for Dustin Diamond. Details on his legal problems are below.
Dustin Diamond's bar brawl landed him in legal trouble
On Christmas Day 2014, police arrested Dustin Diamond after a bar fight in Ozaukee County, Wis., for possession of a switchblade knife. The altercation also involved Diamond's fiancée Amanda Schutz. The Sun reported that Diamond and Schutz were celebrating their engagement when a man unexpectedly punched Schutz in the face. "I sincerely apologize to everyone involved," Diamond said during his sentencing phase, per Hollywood Life. "This was the single most terrifying experience of my life... this is all I've been able to think about for the last six months."
In May 2015, Diamond was convicted of two misdemeanors — carrying a concealed weapon and disorderly conduct. That June, a judge sentenced the actor to four months in prison. According to The Hollywood Reporter, he was released on parole after serving three months, but he violated the agreement in June 2016 after he was caught using oxycodone.
In May 2015, during an interview with Mario Lopez for Extra, Diamond cleared up the rumor that he actually stabbed the person in the bar fight, stating, "I had my pocket knife like this... and the blade was right here and the guy came from around me and grabbed my throat, and so he nicked his arm on the tip of it — it was a Band-Aid, the most expensive Band-Aid I've ever bought." Other than a 2020 foreclosure on his Wisconsin home, Dustin Diamond has stayed out of the news since his legal troubles. Who knows, maybe he will pop up again on Saved by the Bell?