Same address, different beautiful crazy tenants

Melrose Place, C4, Wednesdays, 7.30pm Reviewed by Nick Ward.

With Beverly Hills 90210 having been dragged out of the vaults for a makeover, I suppose it was only a matter of time before attention turned to its sister show from the 1990s beautiful people purgatory, Melrose Place.

Like the new version of 90210, this is a case of revisiting a guilty pleasure from my youth. Well, it screened straight after 90210, and they were my girlfriend's favourite shows, so I had no choice ... (and I'm sticking to that story).

The original Melrose passed itself off as a hip drama about bright young things sharing an apartment complex while trying to make it in LA, but it was really just a big-budget daytime soap, with the characters playing musical beds and trying to get each other arrested, killed, financially ruined or committed at every opportunity. It also deserves the blame for popularising the "mushy pop song playing over a montage at the end of each episode" bit you see in every American drama nowadays.

The only reason I kept watching was Heather Locklear, but we were also introduced to Marcia Cross – who looked cold-eyed and creepy even then, and doesn't seem to have aged a day since – and Kristin Davis, before she became a Sex and the City superstar. There were no black or Asian characters, but there was a gay guy, who went through the wringer just like everyone else, including getting the Jake the Muss treatment from his boyfriend and being framed for murder.

Years later, it's the same address but with a new set of tenants, bar one. Crazy little Sydney, who was at the centre of the best and weirdest 90s Melrose storylines and was supposedly killed in the grand finale, turned out to be alive after all, and had risen to the position of landlady – until she was found floating face down in the pool at the start of episode one.

So, who bumped her off? Jonah the flaky but big-hearted film-maker (a new version of the original Melrose's flaky but big-hearted Billy, the writer), or maybe his fiancee, Riley? Auggie, the alcoholic chef? Lauren, the trainee doctor moonlighting as a hooker to pay for her tuition?

Maybe it was spoiled, thieving, rich boy David – the son of original Melrose character Michael, a two-timing doctor who has since grown up a lot and remarried. Sydney bedded them both – in Michael's case, it was about the 236th time, to thank him for helping her fake her 90s death.

Ella, an utterly ruthless Tinseltown publicist, has stepped into Locklear's shoes as the new generation's alpha blonde, and is intent on bedding Jonah. There's also a new resident psycho in the form of Violet, who is apparently Sydney's long-lost daughter. Could Melrose madness be genetic? And why are the crazy girls always redheads?

The new Melrose gang get out a lot more than their predecessors, joining the other beautiful people having fun in upmarket bars and restaurants and at swanky Hollywood parties, but this show is turning out to be not so much a bitchy, backstabbing melodrama as an extended murder-mystery. Never mind – a new set of outlandish plot twists can't be far away.

- © Fairfax NZ News