- But I have yet to find a single viewer of Melrose Place who has any memory of seeing any of the artworks while watching the show.
(raises hand)
That fuckin' bacteriophage TV tube was one of the original pieces of pop art I hunted up. And yes. That's tough to fucking do before the invention of Google, eBay or Geocities.
I lived with a girl who mandated that every Thursday we would make tacos, make margeritas (she liked this blue shit that's like half triple-sec) and watch 90210 and Melrose Place. Worked out for me; we usually ended up hammered and screwing and i got pretty good at taco seasoning.
But there was definitely something... off about Melrose in a weird way that nothing else was. There was this weird sort of menace from the environment - like pens made out of bullets, like random bacteriophages sitting around, like weird vodka ads that remind you of nothing quite so much the cover to Led Zeppelin I.
Melrose was peculiar in that it had a much larger budget than any other soap opera, it went 1/5th as fast and it had 5x the audience. As a result it was extremely self-aware. It was largely a bunch of soap actors who were clearly and ironically chewing the scenery - I'm told it isn't unusual for accidents and flukes to pivot the plot of soaps but Melrose had a particular obsession with violent crime and terrorism, complete with pyrotechnics and special effects. I'm willing to concede that the overwhelming majority of its viewers had no fucking clue what was going on but I, for one, had any number of conversations along the lines of 'no, dude, it's weird, I can't quite put my finger on it but that show is like pranking the audience somehow.'
The author is incorrect in stating that this is the first "subversive" use of set design.
Buck Rogers, to the modern eye, is gay as fuck. Al Lehman, who also did Three's Company, Laverne & Shirley, Simon & Simon and Murder She Wrote, managed to make the rainbow flag the logo of the "Earth Defense Directorate" just months after the assassination of Harvey Milk.
(never mind, like, every other costuming aspect of that entire show)