Since the turn of the century, three paths have emerged for washed-up stars, displacing hoarier options like “Hollywood Squares.” First, there was the glitzy image rehab of reality TV: invite the cameras into your bedroom, try your hand at ballroom dancing, or tell your secrets to Dr. Phil. Alternatively—or often simultaneously—you could flack for a line of life-style products. But another option was available, too. On a scripted comedy such as “Entourage,” you could agree to “play yourself,” in both senses of the phrase. Satirizing your reputation let you look like a good sport—and, if it clicked, might remind people of why they liked you in the first place. Could Liza Minnelli really be so crazy if she was capable of pulling off such a daring, funny, literally unstable slapstick satire of her own unstable persona, on “Arrested Development”?

The members of the cast of the hit nineties teen soap opera “Beverly Hills, 90210” have chosen door No. 3, stepping into just these kinds of career-rejuvenating air quotes—but, savvily, they’ve chosen to do so as a team, effectively seizing the means of celebrity production. If you’ve seen ads for the new Fox show “BH90210,” you might have assumed, as I did, that the actors—Tori Spelling, Jason Priestley, Jennie Garth, Shannen Doherty, Gabrielle Carteris, Brian Austin Green, and Ian Ziering—would be playing grownup versions of the rich Hollywood teens they played when they were in their twenties. Not so. Instead, the premise of “BH90210” is that the washed-up, middle-aged cast flies to Vegas for a reunion and gets in trouble with the cops. Then Tori Spelling—who, like the real-life Spelling, is running low on reality franchises, and has multiple kids to support—sees dollar signs in the drama. She recruits her former cast members to play versions of themselves in a scripted series, in which the grownup cast of “90210” go to a reunion in Vegas, get in trouble, and then decide to film themselves in a scripted Fox series. At least, I think that’s what “BH90210” is about—considering the number of wacky dream sequences, often set at the Peach Pit diner, it all gets a little confusing.

But it’s also a surprising amount of fun. “BH90210” is the TV equivalent of one of those cereal boxes on which a kangaroo is holding a cereal box with a picture of a kangaroo holding a cereal box, etc. The series shares some thematic elements with other hall-of-mirrors meta-shows, like HBO’s brilliant “The Comeback,” in which the former “Friends” star Lisa Kudrow played an aging sitcom actress—except that “The Comeback,” beneath its jokes, was a serious project, a lacerating satire of Hollywood narcissism and misogyny. “BH90210” touches on these themes (Garth keeps yelling at Priestley about double standards, when the two of them are not making out), but it isn’t trying to lacerate anything. Instead, the show bubbles over with goofy in-jokes about product placement, bad money management, and the highly specific Hollywood danger of getting suckered by one’s scheming influencer spouse. The fact that the stars are behind their own warped self-portraits becomes part of the joke. The result is just smart enough to feel clever, just silly enough to feel relaxing, a guilty pleasure by design.

“BH90210” is also a flattering stage for its cast members, who largely come off well—and, in some cases, as better actors than you might think. Spelling is campily over the top in the show’s pilot, in which she drunkenly steals a dress from a fan, but, once she calms down, she’s disarming as a needy Hollywood princess struggling to be a producer, just like her father, Aaron Spelling, the “jiggle TV” king, who created the original “90210.” Priestley and Garth have lasting chemistry as, respectively, Jason Priestley, a TV director with a cheating wife and an anger-management problem, and Jennie Garth, a gorgeous, multiply divorced former teen star who’s too narcissistic to live a normal life. Ziering gamely takes the biggest hit, playing a self-promoting blowhard who walks around whining about the post-#MeToo culture. Meanwhile, Shannen Doherty—on “Beverly Hills, 90210,” she transformed the Midwestern-ingénue role of Brenda Walsh into a morally ambiguous spitfire by applying bitch face to every line—drifts into view as a globe-trotting do-gooder who is nearly impossible to sign to the show, maybe because, like her offscreen version, she is unwilling to be cast as the villain that she was portrayed as during her tabloid days. In one of the funnier scenes, Spelling hunts Doherty down in the Andes, to Donovan’s “There Is a Mountain,” a sequence so weirdly filmed that half the enjoyment is trying to figure out whether the actresses are even in the same shot.

Surprisingly, it’s Gabrielle Carteris who is the breakout, in the oddly affecting role of Gabrielle Carteris, the actress who played Andrea Zuckerman, the student-journalist “nerd,” on “90210.” Andrea was a crush object for female viewers craving lesbian representation, back when Xena was the best option available—mainly because, in nineteen-nineties terms, having glasses and short hair was enough to qualify, even without any same-sex plots. On “BH90210,” Carteris plays a version of herself, questioning her sexuality after a kiss from a female fan in Vegas. The plot unspools as if Carteris had jumped into her character’s fan fiction, right down to her flirtation with another actress on the show, Christine Elise, who played the punk troublemaker Emily Valentine on “90210,” and now plays herself as an executive at Fox. “As a queer woman, I’m very interested in your story,” Elise purrs. “You mean Andrea’s story,” Carteris says, open to doing some research.

As with Andrea’s story, the strongest plots blend absurdism with streaks of emotional realism, in the style of “Jane the Virgin.” Rather than make the marriages “Dynasty”-level cartoonish, the show creates relatable marital problems for characters such as Brian Austin Green, who played the relatable David, on “90210,” and who is now married to the talented sex-bomb actress Megan Fox. On the show, he is married to a talented sex-bomb pop singer, who is played by the MTV v.j./reality-show host/actress La La Anthony; as he tries to reboot his career after years at home with the kids, damn me if I didn’t actually care a little bit. “BH90210” treads delicately, as well, with mentions of Luke Perry, who played the bad boy Dylan McKay and who died, earlier this year, of a stroke.

At the same time, the show has the wisdom to keep things zany, with regular injections of the surreal and the self-conscious. “Somebody had to do something about that guy’s dialogue,” Ziering says, after he punches the show-within-a-show’s writer in the nose, for cheating with Priestley’s wife. When the gang, unnerved by a stalker who has been sending them mutilated “90210” dolls, attend group therapy, their shrink is Carol Potter, who played the Walsh twins’ mother on the original show. She explains, placidly, “Those years on ‘90210’ were a great training ground for observing a whole gamut of psychopathology.”

Now and then, Spelling and Garth simply hang out in Spelling’s kitchen and debate the risks of revisiting their fame. “What is the thing that that guy said? ‘You can’t go home again’?” Garth asks.

“What guy?” Spelling asks.

Garth shrugs, and grins: “I dunno, some guy. I only went to fake high school.”

This year has been at a fever pitch for reboots, maybe because the eighties and nineties feel stable and sane compared with today, or maybe because streaming has so radically expanded the viewing demographic of older shows. (One of the more perverse side effects of Netflix is the sight of Gen Z furiously debating the sexual politics of “Friends.”) Still, there’s something winningly small scale about “BH90210,” which, for all its pastel Los Angeles outlandishness, amounts to a niche satire of a lost era, wistful and knowing, humble at heart. Maybe, as that guy once said, you can’t go home again. But you can sublet for a short vacation. ♦