te.

Who on earth was Cliff?

It's a bit odd since he was a long-running character that seemed fairly popular. I assume it was partly down to them not needing a spoiler in the John/Marlena/Roman relationship and I guess they already had a resident attorney with Mickey. Of course, 1986-1993 Jed Allen was busy with Santa Barbara anyway, so I guess Don Craig was just allowed to fade.

According to TVTango... http://www.tvtango.com/series/monroes_1995/episodes 1 - 10.8/19 2 - 6.8/10 3 - 5.6 4 - 5 5 - 4.9 No wonder it was pulled. I guess all soap opera coverage went to Central Park West that season (that also flopped).

Just a script at this point.

I think Laurie's home life is pretty much dropped towards the end thankfully. I would've liked to have seen at least a full season of Paper Dolls since it's obvious they tried to course correct a bit towards the end, but of course it was already too late at that point and they aired the series finale December 25th (!). I thought the biggest issue was that it was like we were coming in on season 3 of a show rather than season 1. All successful prime time soaps of the 80s and 90s seemed to have a slow start.

Yeah, you can tell with even having the same opening credits where they credit the guest stars of the episode like Hotel had. 1x02 is also available on YouToob either way:

I re-watched the entirety of Paper Dolls recently and I still think the biggest issue is that it comes off as three shows in one - you have Racine and the agency, the teen scene/Laurie's home life and then of course the Harpers. They probably could've dropped at least one of those elements and had a more coherent show. Incidentally, I found an episode of Glitter (1x05) - it was apparently more like Love Boat and Hotel than Dynasty, but some might be interested in it. Starred Katherine Wentworth:

Honestly, considering Chuck Pratt was on board and created the show I'm not too surprised at the lack of planning ahead. Whenever he's too involved with a show I always assume there just isn't a huge story projection. I can certainly get that networks can interfere and you'll have to be somewhat flexible, but you have to at least know the end point for characters when you're writing it, otherwise you'll end up with a mess.

To be fair, it does seem like the interview was done in (broken) English (I assume the interviewer was French?), translated to another language (French probably), THEN translated back to English.

In the second season she did earn $40k per episode, up from $25k in season one and "nearly double" of what other cast members got: https://ew.com/article/1993/08/06/heather-locklears-pay-increase/ By the end of Melrose she was picking up somewhere between $100-125k per episode (some sources say that a significant increase happened as early as season 3 or 4). It's worth to remember with Melrose Place's long seasons and large ensemble that's a lot to pay an individual actor. I heard Luke got around $90k per episode when he returned to Beverly Hills 90210 in season 9.

Pamela Sue Martin (Fallon #1). Honestly, I'd probably do the same thing even if I was determined to leave. Why not really? Worst thing that can happen is that they'll agree to it and you'll end up turning them down anyway. After all, Victoria Principal was actually actively negotiating with the Dallas producers to return for season 11 and allegedly turned down an offer that would make her the highest paid actress on television.

The rumour was that Laura Leighton was trying to get parity with Heather Locklear, so I either think that she knowingly made a demand she wasn't going to get anyway or Spelling had his goons plant that story in the rags, lord knows the man could be some old school spiteful when he felt people "betrayed" him. PSM got stories "she's over" stories in the press when she turned down to do the Colby's and of course he pretty much tried everything to destroy Central Park West and pretty much gloated when it failed.

Age, I guess, in combination of Deidre and Drake just being comfortable at this point playing off each other that they might just not allow themselves to have chemistry with other actors.

SMG is already tied to two pilots (Sometimes I Lie and Other People's Houses), so it would rough to attach herself to another project, even if it's only in the pilot stage.

The Marlena clones on DAYS that seemingly amounted to nothing. Since the possession storyline ran longer than they expected (probably due to the popularity of it and helping the show fight the OJ pre-emptions) I assume it was originally meant as a follow up storyline to it and then just dropped.

I mean, the season 6 "production" finale is just bizarre in the sense that you have all these departures and no one suffers a grisly Melrose Place death. It's a bit too nice, but I guess they didn't want to splash the budget once they knew that the season 7 premiere was going to air the week after either way. There's also a two and a half months gap in the master date between As Bad As It Gets (6x32) and Buena Sera Mr Campbell (6x33-6x34). I always heard that the show got pulled from production but never found concrete evidence until I saw the discrepancy between the master dates. I wonder what the original plan for the finale was before they fired most of the cast lol.

I think the biggest issue with daytime soaps is that we are so used to "coming back from the dead" stories that we'd have known the minute Kimberly died off screen that she wasn't really dead. See Ciara on DAYS. The reason we were shocked was because no one really expected Melrose to pull such a twist at that point.

To be fair, in hindsight I think the real power couple of Melrose Place was Amanda and Alison, so I kind of liked the idea of Amanda looking after Alison even when she was off screen. I don't mind characters getting unhappy endings either, hell on Peyton Place we never ever got a resolution to what happened to Allison and so many characters left that show just broken and in despair. With that said, they could've easily done a fan service job with Billy's exit. There was nothing significant in him leaving with Jennifer for Rome. But then all exits in the season 6 "production finale" were lame.

I've said it before, but if CTS couldn't or wouldn't do a cameo, they should've just had Billy knock on a door in Atlanta and had a stand-in with blonde hair being seen from behind opening the door. With that said, CTS is one of the few actors that never went through the period of completely disowning the show and she was up for a small cameo in the finale (add that Ally McBeal was on Fox so I'm sure they'd be thrilled at any cross-promotion) so it wasn't undoable, especially once they pushed those episodes and Billy's exit into the summer.

They just don't make prime time promos like this anymore.

@dc11786Definitively. I think it's important to remember that these shows were basically funded by the licensing they could get from individual stations - so with Strange Paradise it was either entirely dropped from most markets or just pushed to an undesirable slot that made said stations pay less for the next cycle. I assume the same thing happened to Rituals - the first cycle of episodes were clearly prioritised by the stations and they were willing to pay a high license amount for it, but when it failed the production company had to inevitably drop the license fee and it became unprofitable. I guess there was some small hope that they could convince the market it was successful in (France) to pay more to finance it, but it wasn't going to happen. Interestingly, we did see a lot of cross-Europe soap attempts in the 90s (and early 00s if you count Ocean Ave.).

I liked Megan, Taylor, Lexi in season 7 and yes, Eve of the later characters. Coop probably could've worked with stronger writing in season 6 (I mean, the idea of another doctor carrying on a torch for Kimberly and worming his way into Michael's life to destroy it isn't bad - in theory; as was Miriam gaslightning Michael). Ryan was okay (but boring), but he was a bit like a lot of hunky male characters on the show and just there to support to ladies. Sam worked for a brief time as the "grounded" character, but once they had to expand on that and paired her with Billy it just went down hill from there. She should've killed by Richard to up the heat on that storyline (and maybe we would've talked about her as a missed opportunity lol), but I guess they just wanted it over with. And yeah, PM was clearly intended to be added to the main cast eventually. He got the same treatment as Laura Leighton and Marcia Cross in appearing in cast shoots before they got added to the opening credits.

Yep. He only talks about working together and obviously remembering better times before Dustin started spiraling and throwing crap at the other cast members.

Season 5 is sort of interesting because they attempted (very poorly) to ground the show, hence Samantha. Oh Sam. Someone once described that season as "daytime soap slow with a break-neck speed" and it's hard to disagree with that comment. Season 6 is just... bad. It's a huge mess. Season 7 finally comes together and makes you wish they actually had an eigth season after praying it should all end in season 6. They cut down the cast, hire Peter Dunne from Knots Landing as a story supervisor and does an actual full season plot (which contradicts what we already know, but whatever, retcons on soaps are childs play).

I think it might have to do with how these syndicated soaps were sold - since they're sold to invidivual markets they're dependent on them picking up/committing to the next cycle and whatever license fee they'll be willing to pay. Since Rituals seems to have at least had some following in France they might've hoped that they could've continued the show based on international sales in addition to sales in some markets in the US that hadn't dropped it. Obviously, that didn't happen, but it might explain why they left a cliffhanger.