IT'S AN EQUILATERAL LOVE TRIANGLE. IN ONE CORNER: the young, fresh-faced, idealistic and somewhat naive Alison, hard-working young person at D & D Advertising. In another: Amanda, the slightly older woman - sometime friend and men-tor to Alison, sometime enemy, always sexy, usually scheming.
And at the apex? Well, there's Billy, of course. Billy Campbell, aspiring magazine writer, midtwenties, nonbroodingly handsome, with a great bod and a personality to match. It's been Billy's job to choose between the two women who are after him, each in her own way. Sometimes, in fact, things get so complicated and intense among the three - sexual harassment, pregnancy and even a stalker are involved - that Billy has to take a long walk, or throw back a beer or two at Shooters, to clear his head.
In short: Billy's the kind of guy whose torture you might enjoy, if he' weren't so damn likable and decent. Think that it's particularly easy in this day and age to deal fairly with two beautiful women at the same time?
"Nope. Because Billy's not a gigolo, " says Andrew Shue, 26, who plays him on Melrose Place. His voice is relaxed, calm, friendly. Not bad for a young actor whose career is threatening to take off in hunkish directions not necessarily conducive to sanity.
Not bad, either, for Billy Campbell, who for all his talent and good looks, is struggling - along with his peers, real and fictional - to make a success of himself in a clogged job market. Killer viruses are about. Student loans are still outstanding. A triple-dip recession is just around the corner.
"Sure there's a lot of energy and anxiety around," says Shue. "But Billy's just like a Labrador puppy. He just believes the best is going to happen. So he dives right in."
And a horde of home viewers has decided to take the plunge with him: Melrose Place - set, poolside, in a Hollywood apart-ment building populated by a whole raft of under-thirty strivers; - has become a quasi-hit, a sort of video coffee house for the young and debt-ridden. Produced by small-screen king Aaron Spelling (Dynasty, The Love Boat, Charlie's Angels, etc.) and run by the Fox network in a suicidal time slot against ABC's Wednesday night juggernaut, Home Improvement, the show's ratings have gone from microscopic (No. 88 last September) to quite respectable (No. 29 for the season finale).
"I never thought it would be canceled, but there was a point when I didn't think it would catch on like it has," says Courtney Thorne-Smith, who plays MP's resident heroine Alison. "I mean, I've been working on TV for nine years and this is the first show where I can actually feel it gaining momentum." And just how does she know for sure? "There are some days when nobody notices me, but there are some days when, like, most people look at me!" she says, giggling. "And they know my name - they're saying 'Courtney' instead of 'Alison.' It's weird."
The cause for the radical upswing? Well, that seductive Billy/Alison/ Amanda trio (the latter played by ex-Dynasty vixen Heather Locklear) deserves most of the credit, but it's a little more complicated than that. In fact, for those who joined MP late in the game (and that's a lot of people), a short history lesson is in order.
MP premiered on July 8, 1992. Its original list of recession-buffeted characters, in addition to Billy and Alison, consisted of: Michael Mancini (Thomas Calabro), a medical intern who moonlights as the building's manager and, later, as a near-sociopathic adulterer; Jane Mancini (Josie Bissett), his sweet, oft-suffering clothing-designer wife; Matt Fielding (Doug Savant), a selfless - and gay - social worker; Rhonda Blair (Vanessa Williams), a bouncy, black aerobics instructor; Sandy Louise Harling (Amy Locane), an aspiring actress with an ever-changing Southern accent; and Jake Hanson (Grant Show), a hunky construction worker whom we first saw trifling with Jennie Garth's affections on Beverly Hills, 90210.
All of the above, needless to say, are attractive, young protagonists who look just fine with their clothes mostly off.
As originally, conceived, MP was to be a semi-spinoff of 90210, a sexier, older version of the adolescent smash in which the denizens of West Beverly High would mingle more or less freely with their MP elders. But after a few weeks, the series' executive producer and creator, thirty-two-year-old Darren Star (who also launched 90210), realized that this was a big mistake: 90210 viewers, whose median age was trending downward toward the fetal level, were turned off by the show's more mature themes, while adult viewers were put off by the association with the teen show. Also worth noting: Fox and Spelling guessed that the emergent star of the show would be Show and pegged their lavish publicity campaigns accordingly. But Show's rugged profile didn't seem to be striking any sparks with the viewers. Instead, people were drawn to the more laid-back image of Shue.
Fox has a slower cancellation trigger-finger than the other three networks, but with ratings languishing in the basement last fall, something had to be done. "As much as we wanted to sell Melrose Place as a spinoff of 90210," says Star, sitting in his spanking new Hollywood office across the street, from Aaron Spelling�s, �It�s a completely different show, and I think had it started out that way, we wouldn't have run into the problems that we did."
The first order of business, says Star, was to lose the Amy Locane character. ("We never did get that accent right," he admits.) Enter Jo Reynolds (Daphne Zuniga), a gutsy photographer who quickly won the affections of brooding biker Jake. The second and most important change was to sever all ties to 90210, both by sending the teenage characters packing and by converting MP to a serialized soap opera format. 90210's self-contained episodes, says Star, are fine for wrapping up Big Issues of Concern to Youth Everywhere in one hour. But the problems of the Melrose Place baby busters - infidelity, unrequited longing, guilty passion, economic stagnation, downward mobility - were best drawn out over as many sweetly agonizing weeks as possible.
Of course, central to the rejiggered soap was the relationship between Billy and Alison, star-crossed from the mo-men in the pilot when she was forced to take in a male roommate in order to escape eviction. Everybody, and we mean everybody, could see that Alison's unconscious longings for Billy were overwhelming her somewhat prissy sense of New Age decorum. And as for Billy - well, a guy can only be so good-looking, and such a gentleman, for so long. (Adding to the intrigue were persistent rumors that the two had become an offscreen couple as well, though they decline to comment.)
With those changes made by episode seven, Melrose Place limped onward. It wasn�t until this February, though, that the final piece of the puzzle was put into place.
�There�s no doubt about it,� says Aaron Spelling, trademark pipe in mouth, sitting in the northwest corner of his roller-rink-size office. �The attention we got was because of my little baby Heather." He smiles. "She brought in that one element that was lacking in the show."
Villainy? Calumny? Bitchery?
"No! It's just that I'm the exciting one," declares Locklear, who will be a regular instead of a "special guest star" next season, and who at the advanced age of thirty-one is the senior member of the cast. "I'm the one who brings fire to the show. At least that's how I prefer to think about it. But other people come up to me and say, 'You're such a bitch!"'
And so, finally, MP possessed all the essential elements of a great soap opera: a villainess ("Yeah, but we're being very careful to reveal that Amanda's not Joan Collins," says Spelling); a villain, in the character of Michael the philandering intern ("He has a sex problem," Spelling says, just in case you thought the guy enjoys fooling around); and various story lines involving health scares (Alison's tumor, which turned out to be, thankfully, of the fibroid variety), death (Billy's father, which brought Alison back to town), and love, love, love. Oh - and it still doesn't hurt to have lots of gorgeous people with their shirts off ("The only time they take the shirts off now is when they're having sex," says Star. "Seriously. We hardly use the pool anymore").
And this season promises to keep up the froth. Although the Fox/Spelling camps are keeping a lid on what will happen to the gang this year, here's what we've heard: Tormentatrix Amanda will set her sights on handsome but luckless Jake; no longer dumb-blonde Jane will divorce the dastardly doctor, who will be forced to deal with his sex addiction; terminally perky Rhonda will finally get hitched and live happily ever after somewhere else; and Matt, it's rumored, will actually get a story line.
"I have a strong feeling," says Star, who's sitting on an order for a whopping thirty-five episodes for the '93-'94
season, "that this show in the coming year is really going
to go over. I think that next season Melrose Place is going
to be a hit. I feel a groundswell happening."
Andy Meisler, a frequent contributor to 'The New York Times,'profiled Jay Thomas in the March issue of 'US.'
