COMMENTARY : Addicted to the ‘Place’ : The Shameful Little Secret Is Out: Fans of ‘Melrose’ Are Really Coming Out of Hiding

The biggest laugh in “Reality Bites,” at least in some screenings, comes with a bit of (sorry, kids) Generation X gaggery so specific to the moment it’s bound to leave future viewers bewildered.

Janeane Garofalo frets that she may be HIV-positive and that her funeral will be like a bad scene out of “Melrose Place,” with everyone showing up to mourn in halters and chokers. This prompts best pal Winona Ryder to brighten her spirits with the assurance that she’s not dying and, perhaps just as importantly, anyway, “Melrose Place” is “a really good show.”

And the crowd goes wild.

The guffaw of recognition this throwaway gag gets means the shameful little secret is really out: The primordial soap has spoken and claimed its hold on a new crop of couch post-modernists who ought to know better and don’t care. Uncloseted masses of twenty- and thirty-somethings and even a few elder boomers are coming out to declare, in rare unanimity with Dan Cortese, “I love this ‘Place’!” In the year and a half since its unpromising premiere, “Melrose” has gradually become the guilty pleasure du jour of a generation.

Which is, tacitly, to say, we’ve all turned into our mothers, and what of it, buddy?

The signs of addiction are pretty much universal. Viewers start with a casual Wednesday night fix, just for, you know, recreational camp value. Soon they’re hooked, protesting rather too much that they’re still watching with all their ironic faculties intact and swearing they could quit the series any time they wanted. You nod, and know better--realizing that they, like you, now view reality itself with a transparent “Fox” logo laid over life’s lower-right-hand corner.

And how weird, yet weirdly appropriate, that the series’ sanitized and sensationalized version of young life in L.A. should enjoy a particularly devoted cult in the city where it’s ostensibly but unrecognizably set.

Those crazy kids on “Melrose” have their problems, to be sure, but they live in a cozy apartment building where everyone knows their neighbors, convene regularly at the hip and friendly local tavern, and have sex lives of such rapid-fire serial monogamy in the AIDS era that Warren Beatty would turn pea-green with envy. Plus, of course, they regularly replace those cool halters and chokers on a yeoman’s salary.

So this is the life we’re leading. Thank God someone had the guts to show it back to us. (And please don’t tip off all our cousins back in the Midwest that we experience this oversexed, under-crime-ridden land of plenty just as vicariously as they do.)

The phenomenon had its beginnings, of course, in “Beverly Hills, 90210,” from which Aaron Spelling and Darren Star spun “Melrose Place” off. There was that time not long ago when perfectly literate pockets of grown-ups we knew would tune into “90210” each week just for the campy spectacle of seeing high school students played by gorgeous actors in their 20s and even 30s who’d clearly skipped a grade or eight.

But once the “90210” youth went off to university last year, the all-important camp quotient lessened considerably. And since the Fox network folks still feel some little (very little?) responsibility toward the show’s primarily teen-aged viewership, the series tends to prudently focus as much on “issues” as on sleaze.

But over at the “Place,” no such conscientious inhibitions are in place, and you can be sure no one’s trying to figure out how to keep one of the characters a virgin. On a typical recent Wednesday, “90210’s” Brenda and Donna wrestled with animal rights and whether to return a liberated pooch to the campus lab. Next hour, “Melrose’s” sisters Jane and Sydney wrestled each other in the complex’s pool, with psychotic Syd dressed in the wedding gown she’d just stolen from saintly Jane for her impending marriage-by-blackmail to the latter’s wicked ex-husband. Yow!

“Melrose” wasn’t always such a salacious place. Initially, the show arrived pre-embalmed as a yawningly sober TV encounter session about young-adult concerns like unemployment and sexual harassment in the workplace. Eventually, the producers wised up and made the show almost exclusively about the characters sexually harassing one another. This is nothing new under the TV-web sun, to be sure, but serves its purpose as a sort of shameless nostalgia-mongering for the Just Say Yes era.

Since the original cast was established as virtue personified, the sensationalizing and soaping-up of “Melrose” was accomplished twofold--by turning Jane’s (Josie Bissett’s) faithful husband Michael (Thomas Calabro) into a lying, alcoholic, womanizing louse, and by adding two new vixen, Sydney and Amanda, to the incestuous brew. No wonder these three are the show’s late-inning hits.

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As Sydney, a guest character who became a leading lady, Laura Leighton has one of the best mouths in show business; playfully pursing her lips while trying to blackmail a guy into loving her-- that little minx! --or widening them into a sexy, maniacal grin when she gets her way, you can see Sydney’s clinically insane gears operating at all times. She’s either the most misogynist-baiting black widow creation since Tokyo Rose or else a poor girl who just needs a Prozac prescription and a chance to really study the collected works of Melodie Beattie.

Heather “Be Thy Name” Locklear’s stint as Amanda was also supposed to be (and is still billed as) a limited guest shot, but she so quickly became the toast of the show that the producers found her star salary worth the indefinite cost. The ex-”Dynasty” actress plays a “Dynasty”-style bitch, but more ambiguously--as one who does the right thing almost as often as the wrong, a lovably self-serving powermonger who doesn’t seem to even know she’s committing a social faux pas when she walks up to Alison at her engagement party and blurts, “Billy didn’t tell you? That when you were at the ranch, we slept together?”

Whatever her lack of a moral compass, you have to root for Amanda because she’s the only character on the show to whom the writers have assigned even a whiff of intelligence. You’ve got Billy (Andrew Shue), the most open-mouthed, lunkheaded hunk of an alleged magazine editor who ever lived; Alison (Courtney Thorne-Smith), an imbecile just for digging him; Jo (Daphne Zuniga), no rocket scientist herself when it comes to picking criminals as boyfriends; even the token gay (Doug Savant), who has less sex life than anybody, has a libido where half a brain might normally go.

“Melrose Place’s” feature players are all as pretty as models and dumb as oxen--allowing us to feel covetous and superior all at once, a pretty addictive mix.

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Not that there aren’t occasional epiphanies or even humanizing moments of redemption for the shiftier characters (most likely in the annual Christmas episode). But “Melrose” gives all its characters the kind of moral short-term memory that ensures that, even after they’ve been chastened or learned a lesson at the conclusion of one story arc, they’re witless enough to soon be making all the same mistakes over again with different partners and looking for love in all the wrong “Places.”

That’s the cyclical nature of a soap. That’s high camp. Oddly enough, come to think of it, that’s also life. Maybe this pleasure isn’t quite so guilty after all.