Mario Lopez backed costar Tiffani Thiessen after she said “Saved by the Bell” residual payments have dried out, another ’90s TV star watching streaming erase the old paycheck model.
USA TODAY reported that Lopez posted a brief reply on X on Wednesday, Sept. 30, after Thiessen described how little the classic NBC sitcom still pays.
His two-word reaction, “Real talk!”, lined up with her claim that the residual stream is effectively gone. For fans who still stream Bayside High reruns, the money trail looks nothing like the syndication era that once kept working actors paid.
Thiessen, who played Kelly Kapowski, spoke on Page Six Radio on Sept. 24. Hosts Danny Murphy and Evan Real heard her put the situation in blunt terms.
She said the residuals have “dried out.”
"It's like, negative now. It probably costs more to print the check."
She also said the original cast had no leverage when the show was made. “We didn't have pull on that show at all,” Thiessen said. “We made nothing, and we just did our job.”
Lopez, the Emmy-winning host who starred as A.C. Slater, was cast at 15. Both he and Thiessen are now 52. His short X post treated her account as familiar, not shocking.
SAG-AFTRA describes residuals as payments actors receive when a show is used beyond the work covered by initial compensation, re-airs, video and DVD, and old-fashioned syndication. That model depended on stations buying reruns and cutting checks when the episodes ran again.
“Saved by the Bell” fit the old pattern. The NBC series ran four seasons from 1989 to 1993, became a Saturday-morning hit, and helped launch the Teen NBC block. It also spun off a pair of follow-up series and two TV movies. Under the prior system, that kind of afterlife meant ongoing payments.
Full House actress Jodie Sweetin has described the same squeeze. During an April appearance on “The McBride Rewind” podcast, she said she got “a one-cent check the other day” in royalties.
Her explanation matched Thiessen’s complaint about the new distribution reality.
"There's no syndication anymore because it's all in streaming. Who gets paid for that? Nobody gets paid for that."
Lopez’s career did not stop at Slater. He later appeared in “Pacific Blue,” “Outta Time,” “The Bold and the Beautiful,” and “Nip/Tuck.” He cohosted “Extra” from 2007 to 2019 and “Access Hollywood” from 2019 until that show’s Sept. 11 conclusion. In 2020 he returned as the gym teacher and football coach in Peacock’s “Saved by the Bell” revival.
Thiessen and Lopez were brought in with Elizabeth Berkley to revamp the earlier Disney Channel series “Good Morning, Miss Bliss,” joining Mark-Paul Gosselaar, Dustin Diamond, and Lark Voorhies. The original kids’ hit still circulates. The residual checks, by their account, do not.
None of the comments included studio payroll sheets or a full contract dump. What they did include was a consistent picture from people who lived the back end of a once-ubiquitous sitcom: the episodes keep playing, and the old residual math no longer does.
When platforms re-monetize catalogs built under network rules, the talent who showed up for work should not be left staring at a one-cent stub or a check that costs more to print than it pays.
