Dan Liebke's Astonishing Tales

I’ve been watching repeat episodes of Melrose Placerecently, primarily because I could see no other logical way of approaching the problem. (The problem being, of course, what to do when Melrose Place is being unashamedly repeated right there on your television screen.)

Not many people remember now, but this fine show wasn’t always the ludicrous carnival of bed-hopping popinjays into which it eventually evolved. Initially it delved into serious and important issues of the day for ’90’s twentysomethings (and, indeed, ’20’s ninetysomethings). And lo, its ratings tanked. And then Heather Locklear came along and it transmogrified itself into a ratings machine.

Or so the official history books would have us believe. But surely I can’t be the only one to notice the bald-faced alphabetical skewing of the cast names in those early episodes?? After all, the show itself listed its cast in alphabetical order and after a couple of token B’s and C’s (Bissett and Calabro) we bypass the majority of the alphabet and leap straight into the S’s (your Savants, your Shues, your Shows) and eventually the Z’s (Hello, Daphne Zuniga. Congratulations on your career so far).

Could it be this alphabetical imbalance that viewers initially objected to? And could it be that the successful addition of Heather Locklear owed more to her monogram than any acting credentials she might have brought to the show? It’s a theory that I think should be considered more closely.

And then, of course, rejected as the incomprehensible nonsense that it is.

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