‘Melrose’ Finale Draws High Ratings, Protests

The two-hour season finale of Fox’s “Melrose Place” scored the highest ratings in the program’s history Wednesday night--but without the much-talked about kiss between two gay characters, prompting cries of censorship from the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation.

“This is defamation by invisibility,” Lee Werbel, executive director of the GLAAD chapter in Los Angeles, said in a statement Thursday. “Here is a television show portraying steamy romances, including the opening scene in this very episode, in which a heterosexual couple is in bed (implicitly after making love), and two gay characters cannot even show affection.”

Producer Darren Star filmed the scene of series regular Doug Savant giving a good-night kiss to another man and showed it to Fox executives two weeks ago, executive producer Aaron Spelling said. At the request of Fox, the producers agreed to cut it. A scene in which Savant talked about the kiss with Andrew Shue’s character was broadcast.

Fox officials, who refused to comment on the issue, were worried that advertisers might not sponsor the episode, according to Spelling.

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“They said, ‘Is it necessary to have the kiss, because the sales department might have problems,’ ” Spelling said Thursday. “And we said, ‘OK, we’ll get rid of the kiss, but we’re not going to cut the scene afterward where they talk about it.’ That’s what’s important--not the kiss.”

The version that aired Wednesday showed the two men moving toward each other in slow motion, and then cut to Shue’s character looking on with a shocked expression.

“Melrose Place” attracted 21% of the available audience Wednesday--representing about 12.5 million homes--and beat the competition from 8-10 p.m. on ABC, CBS and NBC.