Where were they then?: Mayim Bialik in the ’90s

If you have a lasting fondness for the Rachel haircut, you must, in no small part, thank Mayim Bialik.

A year-plus before her 16th birthday, the future Big Bang Theory regular, current Call Me Kat star, and latest Jeopardy! guest host got the keys to her first TV vehicle. Which vehicle and which direction to take it in was her weighty choice.

As Bialik looked to build on her breakthrough as a tween Bette Midler character in 1988’s Beaches, NBC’s Blossom and Fox’s Molloy simultaneously scored her services as the title performer.

With Blossom, which aired its teaser pilot July 5, 1990, and unleashed a full-fledged series six months later, she was the onscreen daughter of Soap alum Ted Wass. With Molloy, which premiered three weeks after Blossom, she was onscreen stepsiblings with a coming-off-The-Wizard Luke Edwards and an as-yet-unknown Jennifer Aniston.

The odds were naturally against both shows gaining sufficient traction. The situation was all but bound to reaffirm the proverb about pursuing two rabbits at once.

By the time The Washington Post profiled Bialik in mid-February 1991, Blossom was performing its title verb. Molloy was six months into the past tense, having completed seven episodes and aired only four.

As Post reporter Michael E. Hill relayed at the time, it was largely Bialik’s decision. Hill wrote that, around Molloy’s six-episode mark, “the production was overhauled, leaving a show that Bialik was not fond of.” Conversely, Blossom was brimming with promise.

Retroactively considering the possibility of Fox pressing her to move forward with Molloy, Bialik told Hill, “I would have said I’m not going to do it because I’m not happy.”

Her reliable source of fulfillment, Blossom, proceeded to log 114 episodes, concluding May 22, 1995. Its final season fully overlapped with the rookie campaign of an NBC cohabitant, Friends.

Can you imagine if Bialik’s impression of her options were reversed five years earlier? She and Aniston may have stayed colleagues throughout the first half of the ’90s, leaving the part of Rachel Green open to a Courteney Cox, a Parker Posey, or a Denise Richards.

There is no guarantee any of them would have pulled off a shag Gen X women wanted to emulate. The do all but certainly would not have resembled what Aniston’s stylist, Chris McMillan, came up with.

At best, The Rachel simply would have taken a different direction, not unlike Bialik and Aniston’s careers. Even if the hair still stood out, another actor might not have embodied the character under it to the same consensus breakout proportion that Aniston did. (Awards-wise, she was easily the most decorated constituent of the Friends sextet.)

If Bialik’s impressions of Blossom and Molloy were reversed, the part of Friends’ Rachel Green may have remained open to a Courteney Cox, a Parker Posey, or a Denise Richards.

But Aniston was free to do so, after Molloy ended so soon and two other sitcoms (Ferris Bueller and Muddling Through) and a sketch series (The Edge) each had one-and-done seasons with her over the next four years.

Meanwhile, amidst Blossom, which garnered contemporaneous references on Married…With Children, Seinfeld, and The Simpsons, Bialik built on a handful of recurring and one-off parts from the final quarter of the ’80s. Roles of that nature on Doogie Howser M.D., Empty Nest, MacGyver, and Murphy Brown all spilled over to 1990.

As the new decade and the new show burgeoned, her profile also yielded three invitations in as many years to appear as herself on unscripted programs. And all before she finished her secondary studies at North Hollywood High School.

ABC’s The Earth Day Special in 1990 and Sea World’s Mother Earth Celebration in 1991 both signaled Bialik’s multilayered philanthropic streak. In addition to environmental protection, her aforementioned Post profile touched on confronting animal cruelty and homelessness as two of her causes.

Another defining trait — a taste for trivia and mind-testing games — crashed the small screen in 1992. On September 2 of that year, Bialik appeared opposite The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air’s Tatyana Ali and Growing Pains’ Jeremy Miller on a celebrity installment of Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?

Fittingly, given that Double Trouble was the episode’s accomplice of the day, the three guest gumshoes each teamed with an everyday teen contestant to try and crack a Tiananmen Square case. Double Trouble had somehow uprooted and both figuratively and literally lifted the Beijing landmark.

Along with Santhosh Benjamin, Bialik hit 7-for-9 on the first-round questions they fielded and advanced to the Jail Time Challenge. They lost to Miller and Lindsey Wolper in a nailbiter, but took home a Worldbeat — “the music for the ’90s,” the late Chief Lynne Thigpen called it — compilation package and a portable CD player to spin it on.

Five months after that edutaining appearance, Bialik graduated from North Hollywood, completing her credits largely through tutors around the Blossom set. With admission to Harvard, Princeton, UCLA, and Yale all bagged, she had another deceptively daunting dilemma at hand.

Ultimately, she deferred on the Ivy League for the balance of Blossom’s run, then chose her hometown option beginning in 1996. But in between, her penchant for scholarship and new challenges kept radiating.

As Bialik related to Entertainment Weekly’s Alan Carter in mid-July 1993, plugging the premiere of a grand deviation from onscreen norms through a Lifetime Network movie, she was content to fill her downtime “reading and thinking. I’d rather talk about Somalia.”

Official higher education stayed on hold while Blossom ran its five-year course. And Bialik even assured Carter she was flattered by MAD magazine’s parody of her breakout show.

As sporadic as Bialik’s voice performances were in her hectic undergraduate years, the various shows’ longstanding cult status among ’90s kids lends them extra weight.

While multi-majoring in Hebrew, Jewish studies, and neuroscience for the rest of the decade, Bialik transferred her acting game to the recording booth. (The exceptions to that were one-shot spots on NBC’s The John Larroquette Show and the Sci Fi series Welcome to Paradox.)

As sporadic as Bialik’s voice performances were in her hectic undergraduate years, the various shows’ longstanding cult status among ’90s kids lends them extra weight. Even before enrolling at UCLA, she put in two appearances on CBS’ The Adventures of Hyperman, which spread out its half-season lifespan of 13 episodes from November 1995 to August 1996.

And then there were the two pairs of shows on the era’s two breakout networks for kids. The fall of ’96 saw her speak twice on Cartoon Network’s The Adventures of Jonny Quest, then once apiece on the Nicktoons Hey Arnold! and Aaahh!! Real Monsters.

In 1999, Bialik was back on Hey Arnold!, bolstering another not-all-it’s-cracked-up-to-be interaction between protagonist fourth graders and manipulative sixth graders who carry themselves more like high-school upperclassmen.

In her first stint on the show, which debuted October 21, 1996, Bialik joined Simpsons regular Pamela Hayden as Maria and Connie, respectively. The title figures of the “Sixth Grade Girls” segment enlist Arnold and Gerald as school-dance dates to antagonize their immature, inattentive, short-fused boyfriends.

Between her Nickelodeon gigs, Bialik played another series title character’s foil on a failed date. In the “Red Faced in the White House” segment of Cartoon Network’s Johnny Bravo, she lent her voice to the fictitious president’s daughter. But that character did not need to do much, if anything, to make the inept and overconfident Johnny’s hopes unravel.

Back in the terrestrial network range, Bialik notched two credits as Kirsten Kurst on ABC’s Recess before the ’90s were up. She garnered two more, along with her first of two degrees in neuroscience from UCLA, after the turn of the decade.

With her predominant preoccupation of the latter stages of the ’90s, she emboldened an early-stages observation from the late Paul Junger Witt, executive producer of Blossom, to the Post’s Hill.

“We wanted to have a young woman who is capable of articulating herself and is capable of thinking, perhaps confusedly, but thinking deeply,” Witt told the paper in February 1991. “And we happened to get the whole package in one person.”

And by the time Bialik’s bachelor’s finished packaging her blueprint for the next century, Aniston had secured her first of five straight Emmy nominations. Not such an allergenic outcome for the onscreen stepsiblings split up after a month at the dawn of the ’90s.