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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 Simpsons.