FLASHBACK: Stop The Inanity! 1996

STOP THE INANITY!

By Ginia Bellafante
TIME Magazine
May, 13, 1996

For many Americans the phrase great soap opera--like a great Douglas Sirk movie--will always remain an oxymoron. Pity the unenlightened: melodramas, like cheap beers, are not created equally--there are Rolling Rocks in the sea of Schmidt's Lights. For many of its 26 years on air, ALL MY CHILDREN has been one of TV's best soap operas, not only because it limns believably impassioned lovers and cruel, cruel villains and tantalizingly suspenseful story lines, but also because the writers and actors have always recognized the inherent absurdity of the genre in which they work. Susan Lucci may not deserve an Emmy for her dramatic acting, but who can deny her talents as a first-rate comedienne? For years she has tackled Erica Kane with a mockingly forced resoluteness as Erica has gone about collecting ex-husbands through various careers as a supermodel (an occasion for Mahogany-inspired fashion-shoot montages), a cosmetics executive and editor of a news magazine called Tempo.

AMC gave birth to the soap-as-satire, but no other serial has advanced the idea as marvelously as MELROSE PLACE during its glory days--glory days that the current season, due to conclude in two weeks, has proved are long gone. The show will return in September, but its decline has been so steep--should it even bother?

MELROSE, centered around the booth-tanned inhabitants of a Los Angeles apartment complex, debuted in 1992 as an unconvincing thirtysomething for Gen Xers. When it returned the following season it was something else altogether, a dumb-brilliant parody of the soap universe, a show in which women dressed for work as though life were a continual audition for the Howard Stern Show. Heather Locklear was now entrenched as a nasty, libidinal Leona Helmsley-ish landlady in the making, while Sydney the hooker-stripper was chasing her sister Jane's amoral husband Michael.

All was right with MELROSE, and it only got better. During the 1994-95 season the story lines became more and more compellingly ridiculous. Former porn star Traci Lords showed up to lure Sydney into a polygamous cult, while nutbag Dr. Kimberly Shaw joined a paramilitary self-help group featuring Mackenzie Phillips.

But in spite of all the whirling lunacy they concocted, MELROSE writers still kept a hand in the world of plausible fantasy--the bend-don't-break rule that is the essence of soap-opera craft. The writers also understood that soaps must always have, at their core, at least one pair of earnest lovers whose thwarted longing fuels the drama. Melrose has Billy and Alison, lovers too personalityless to be destined for any other. Last year we cared whether they would beat gargantuan odds--Alison's alcoholism, her affair with an N.F.L. sex addict--and find their way back into each other's hearts. This year Billy and Alison have been ripped asunder for so long we wouldn't care if they took vows of celibacy and joined the cast of SAVED BY THE BELL.

As for even strained plausibility, Amanda is now rekindling her love with Dr. Peter Burns for the umpteenth time but seems to have forgotten that he tried to kill her last year when she discovered he was embezzling money from a drug company. That was an aspect of the plot that executive producer Frank South admits, "we decided not to dwell on." South believes the world of MELROSE actually makes sense, an unsettling thought. "We feel it has definite emotional and physical boundaries. The characters are just a little more desperate."

And this year a little too serious. The most maddening aspect of the show has been the increasing and incongruous presence of real-world issues. In the past months MELROSE has tackled child abuse, outing and now date rape. Message drama has its place on television, but not within the context of a show whose characters utter lines like, "You think I want a life of peanut butter and jelly? I want lobster. I want caviar. I want style." Perhaps the beginning of the end really came toward the climax of this last season, when Amanda had cancer. She didn't seem to lose a strand of hair during her chemo treatments, but she came out of it all stripped of her fine-tuned ruthlessness.

Alas, when MELROSE returns in the fall, the writing team will consist of a doctor, a lawyer, a performance artist and a New York City playwright who has worked on Homicide. That's a high-minded bunch. If we must endure more, MELROSE would be wise to poach a few writers from THE SIMPSON.