A week is a long time in politics. Ten years is a lifetime in US television. And so, a decade after the original Melrose Place – following the lives, loves and all-round lathery madness of the highly toned inhabitants of a West Hollywood apartment complex – ended, we have a new one (Mondays, 11pm, Fiver), so bright and shiny that it almost hurts to look at it. Which is going to be tricky, because you certainly can't look away.
By the end of the first episode, Sydney (presumed killed in the original MP but miraculously resurrected as the complex's landlady this time round) has been found floating – indisputably dead this time –in the swimming pool. "She was stabbed in the doorway!" cries one of her tenants, which sounds particularly painful.
Her tenants, the new cast, are Riley, a slightly sappy schoolteacher who gets engaged to Jonah (a dopey but "incredibly talented film-maker with a point of view and something to say!") after he nuts up and blackmails a famous director into hiring him. Ella, a hard-nosed publicist secretly in love with Jonah but dulling the pain of unrequited feelings by bedding brunette ladies in the meantime. Auggie, a sous chef ("Sydney was the one who convinced me to be a chef!" The exclamation mark key takes a severe battering at MP script conferences) and David, Sydney's lover, the tearaway son of one of Sydney's former lovers in old MP. Lauren is a med student who trades sex for tuition fees. Violet is, so far, just a redhead, but with revelations to come, one suspects.
They have a combined age of 42 and look like splinters of other actors. Auggie is a Tom Cruise manqué. Violet is Marcia Crossed with Christina Hendricks, and Ella is a shard broken off of MP's most legendary alumna Heather Locklear.
Most of them have motive for killing Sydney and – as The Vampire Diaries is so bad and Gossip Girl is MIA – I shall stay, entranced as a magpie by the glittering madness, until they find out just whodunnit. Exclamation, no doubt, point!
