“Beverly Hills 90210” is no more, and I have to admit to experiencing a sense of loss no amount of pizza, shopping, alcohol or loveless sex can fill.

My soul is now a void — dark, empty and lifeless. Wherefore Brandon? Wherefore Kelly? Now that “Beverly Hills 90210” has finally gone off the air, people around the world are going to have to depend solely on “Baywatch Hawaii” for their erroneous stereotypes of Americans.

There really is a love/hate relationship with the United States going on all over the world and images like these are largely responsible. Americans are obsessed with the dying dream that is or was their birthright.

The market might well be strong, but Americans are still dumfounded as to where the hell their piece of the pie went. Sure, it’s a bigger piece than most other citizens have of planet earth, but it is a Hostess fruit pie that’s been sitting in the machine for god knows how long. We aren’t starving and we aren’t evolving either.

Look at the popular viewing habits of countries that loudly and proudly hate us. Their favorite shows are “Baywatch” and “90210” across the board. My old English roommate despised everything about Americans, but he dug “Baywatch” and Elvis — quintessentially American icons. What gives? I think I have it figured out.

The United States is like the prettiest girl in your high school. She’s popular and all the boys think she is a hottie, but she spends her time hanging out mostly with the captain of the football team and going to parties with all the other cool kids.

Now, maybe she is stuck up and maybe she isn’t. You would never know because you can never get up the nerve to talk to her and when you do manage to say something, you end up looking like the king of the dorks because, in the end, you just don’t have anything in common with her.

That doesn’t mean that you don’t worship her from afar and think about the day you might be good enough to socialize with her or, god willing, ask her to the prom. But all of your friends are in the same boat as you so when the subject of the most popular girl in school comes up, you pretend to hate her and her kind more than you would like to be them because you think they think they are better than you.

The hate you feel is a coping mechanism more than anything else. You might talk a good game and burn her in effigy around your friends, the people you HAVE to associate with, but whenever that girl asks you to pass the salt at lunch or engages you in conversation, you are all smiles and “aw shucks.”

So when America’s second-largest cultural export — right after Coca-Cola — is almost as nauseatingly sweet and tempting as its first, you can hardly blame people for getting the wrong idea.

Perhaps the best way to solve this problem is change things up a little. “90210” was a pretty unrealistic show. I don’t think I am busting any bubbles by saying that the issues and themes of one of Fox’s longest running teeny bopper exploitation shows were pretty light.

Sure, every once in awhile the youth of West Beverly High and California University respectively would cover a hip topic of concern to the youth of America like cutting, anorexia, child abuse or AIDS, but they did it so lightly as to make a mockery of those topics.

Take Kelly’s little coke habit around season six. Here Kelly is, a junior at CU, descended from a culture of wealth, debauchery and substance abuse that has spawned Charlie Sheen, Robert Downey Jr., Heidi Fleiss and the Corey’s Feldman and Haims.

You’re telling me she doesn’t have a drug problem until she is 21? And her friends are shocked and stunned when they find out she has one?

In the real world, they would have been shocked and stunned that she held out that long. In reality, she should have spent her junior year at the Betty Ford clinic trying to get that monkey off her back.

Even more shocking was Donna’s virginity. While I personally think that waiting to have sex for as long as possible isn’t a bad idea per se, it doesn’t make for realistic, hard-hitting television.

TV’s Blossom getting her cherry popped at 15 may have irritated the milk-fed populace of these here United States, but that was only because they knew that the truth hit too close to home.

Granted, Tori Spelling’s daddy produced the show and enjoyed keeping his surgically altered baby pure for years beyond her expiration date, even if it was only fiction. How much more interesting is THAT story? Aaron Spelling must have spent thousands on that girl’s surgery. She’s been cut and pasted more times than a chain e-mail pyramid scheme, yet her daddy wants to keep her 6 in perpetuity. Truly kinky.

I am also not happy about their prodigious use of a character known as the evil Greg Jerrett, but that was really more of an homage than a slight, so I let it go.

The real residents of “90210” could have made for a truly compelling television drama. Imagine the ratings of a show where the featured players do drugs and engage in stylized orgies that would have made Stanley Kubrick blush while crashing their expensive sports cars into the homes of innocent poor people in neighborhoods where they buy their smack, crack and hashish.

Every other episode, daddy’s lawyers get them off with a warning, a speeding ticket or probation. Rehab wouldn’t even be an option unless they killed someone — THAT is good TV.

“Rosanne” was a more realistic view of American life, and it is popular in England. Problem is the comedy there was so true to life that most foreigners no doubt thought is was a farce.

They all know Americans are rich, spoiled sexual freaks — or at least they want to be.

The world eats up our TV programs and movies; they see us they way we want them to see us: popular, smart, and funny. No wonder they hate us.

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Greg Jerrett is a graduate student in English from Council Bluffs. He is opinion editor of the Daily.