Melrose Place

[Khan]

 

I hope you will check it out, if/when it's ever made available on streaming.  Even today, you can feel KL's influence on many shows.  It was the kind of show that often transcended from good soap opera into good drama, period.

[juppiter]

Knots really is one of the best shows of all time. Writing, acting, music, everything. And the longevity of it means they could write things on levels that most shows just can’t. And I may be the exception, but I love the first three seasons. 

 

anyway, I’m watching season 5 of MP and... lol. It’s not great.

 

The Sydney/Jane/Richard/Sam stuff could have been fun but it’s just missing something. They maybe needed more camp and they needed to do a better job making Sam the straight man in all this — it is kind of bizarre that she’s putting up with all this considering she literally just met Jane and Sydney five minutes ago. 
 

I HATE Jake and Alison together. It doesn’t make sense that Alison wouldn’t forgive Billy. It doesn’t make sense that Alison is still working at Shooters. 
 

the Peter trial storyline and Peter now having a backstory or changed identity or whatever is a snooze. I don’t think Jack Wagner should have come back after his initial arc in season 3. He’s just boring and I’m not buying any of this. 
 

Matt being on drugs is fun. Doug Savant is a really good actor. He’s definitely playing things that aren’t in the script by seeming strung out even when he’s not supposed to be. This show doesn’t deserve him. 
 

Lisa Rinna is weird and obsessed but seems like she might be fun later. We’ll see. 
 

I can see what someone said above about the show forgetting the relationships that made it great. 

Edited February 6, 2021 by juppiter

[Soaplovers]

 

Knots Landing is the gold standard of primetime soaps.  Ingmar Bergman's Scenes of a Marriage inspired the creation of it.  

[allmc2008]

It was also inspired by this film. In fact, the first episode of KL and the first act or so of this film follow the same story beats: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_fOZ_wBJ0Q

@Khan have you seen it?

And yes. KL is the gold standard. I'm at the end of season 7. 5 episodes left.

[te.]

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

[Chris 2]

Amen to this. I think his return and blowing up the building were the first signs that the show was going off the rails. I always found Peter arrogant and unlikeable. 

[detroitpiston]

Yeah I associate Peter with the downfall of the show. A completely unlikable scoundrel and he and Frank South's rise BTS is when the show becomes less grounded and more like one long Skinemax series minus the nudity where nothing meaningful happens outside of the characters being trainwrecks and screwing each other literally and figuratively. There is no heart outside of what the cast brought and once the OGs started leaving that was lost completely.

[FrenchBug82]

While we will agree to disagree on whether the writers intentionally or not stopped writing for the OGs, I 1000% agree with the above sentiment. That Billy walked in the sunset with Jennifer of all people, a relationship noone cared about, seems particularly insulting. Even if they couldn't get CTS to do a cameo by then, they could have simply written that he was "joining her" in Atlanta and leave it to the audience's imagination to root for them to get together. We got CTS for the finale... how did they not even nod to it for early fans is just puzzling. Such easy fanservice.
But Billy is the perfect example of why I stick by my opinion that the writers had gotten bored and stuck with the OGs: while the very early Sam/Billy stuff was alright IMO, the dreck that was their marriage lasted incredibly longer than the runoff to his departure. Similarly, Sydney's storyline drought lasted an entire season long - until the better late Craig stuff that was clearly intended to tee up her departure, ironically. I could go on.
Of course, your reply could be that if the writers didn't know what to do with the OGs, they should have changed *the writers* rather than the characters and I'd agree! It is not like it would have been impossible to give them fun stuff to do. But something had to give by that point because a show can't run on eight cylinders for three seasons in a row before the engine starts to hurt.

 

Edited February 6, 2021 by FrenchBug82

[te.]

 

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.

[FrenchBug82]

 

Well, I am not entirely there. Peter was unlikeable for sure and it is absolutely true he never was given enough layers to justify bringing him back after being evil - contrarily to the way they managed to keep Kimberly around for instance.
But JW, irritating as his acting ticks can be, had great chemistry with a lot of people and the Michael/Peter dynamic was one of the rare bright spots of the later seasons for me.

Howeer I believe that Amanda getting together with him after he tried to kill her, no matter the excuses or how much time had gone, was out-of-character for her. Early Amanda doesn't forgive, let alone that kind of stuff.
I didn't think Peter was necessarily the downfall of the show but I do think it was the beginning of turning Amanda into something... different than she initially was. She had managed to be the core of the show while being a bitch and she had managed to have a lot of rooting value while being a bitch. It is unfortunate the writers didn't trust her to continue carrying the show without softening her (writers make that mistake often; see Days' Sami) and turning her into a romantic heroine and a victim. The focus should have stayed the other way around: not as a protagonist with an edge but as an antagonist with rooting value.

 

Yes! But it would have been even fine not even going to that trouble and just showing him landing in... Atlanta. Not even saying a word about Allison. But fans of the show would have gone Hmmmm and that would have been enough to give a bit of comfort to the fandom. 

I know Melrose Place was never known to go for the subtle route but watching the cool trailer for the incredibly disappointing series finale underscores how much they screwed the pooch by not using the enormous library of plots and characters they had to at least give fans just a bit of satisfaction.

Edited February 6, 2021 by FrenchBug82

[te.]

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.

[FrenchBug82]

I don't either! I just don't think it should have been Billy and Allison's fate though who, as caroline said, were the end game when the show started.
I do agree having Amanda keeping that bond off-screen was a nice little detail but nowhere near the amount of satisfaction fans-from-the-entire-run deserved
I also think they too easily picked death as their unhappy ending of choice - Sydney's exit should have been cleverer considering her track record for instance. They had already used the institutionalized thing with her but something along those lines might have been more twisted and "fun".
The one exit I absolutely loved was Craig's. Didn't care for the character but I got to say suicide was an extremely ballsy to write off a character and it very very very rarely happens on TV. It worked for what the character had been and actually made him more sympathetic in death than he was while he was on the show. So I give them credit for this "unhappy ending".
But otherwise killing them off or seeing them off at an airport were the go-to write-offs and ... meh.

[titan1978]

Yes!  I think people overlook that while Heather injected a lot into the show, and deserves plenty of credit, without CTS’s Alison the central conflict would not have been as great.

 

When I was a kid, Jo and Sydney were my favorite characters, but Alison and Amanda were my favorite rivals.

[Huntress]

I think CTS, Heather, Laura Leighton and of course Marcia Cross were the best actors on the show and also had the most demanding scenes. Of the male actors, only Thomas Calabro was given enough material where he could shine. All the other male characters, perhaps except early Jake, were written as duds. 

 

I'd love to know which scenes resulted in Heather Locklear being nominated for a Golden Globe. I mean, she was nominated 4 times in a row between 94 and 97... Of course she was (and has always been) a talented actress, but I never thought she was great enough to be nominated for any award - especially for working on Melrose Place which wasn't critically acclaimed at all.

[FrenchBug82]

In all fairness, and that's a big issue for me with TV awards, I do think the system that makes people win based on single scenes/episodes is fundamentally flawed.
It is ESPECIALLY true of daytime soaps but it applies here. Someone creating a well-rounded layered character over time is doing just as hard a job - if not harder - than someone acting well in a single emotional scene. Acting is not just expressing feelings and emotions but creating a character in full and I wish there was more recognition of that aspect of acting.
I don't think Heather had many award-friendly big emotional scenes on MP but she did manage to construct a character that was complicated, layered and that the audience took to despite her being not outwardly very sympathetic. That's a LOT harder to do than crying over a dead husband or whatever "big scenes" people like to get for their reels because it is subtle and takes a lot of skill to create an entire persona.

And yes the female ensemble was clearly superior to the male cast - and the female characters were, barring Michael, collectively a lot more interesting and driving story a lot more than the male cast. Which is generally true for a lot of soaps tbh.