The CW’s ‘Melrose Place’ Revival Failed 15 Years Ago — What Went Wrong?

The original Melrose Place debuted to 16 million viewers and became a primetime-soap favorite with its outlandish plot twists. The Fox series’s 2009 CW revival, however, scored just 2.3 million viewers with its premiere and eventually dropped to 860k viewers.

Sunday (April 13) marks the 15th anniversary of the newer Melrose Place’s first season finale and series finale, not that many viewers will even remember. So what went wrong? Let’s take a look at why the second generation of this TV soap failed to make a splash.

The series had too few originals.

For starters, precious few people who hung around the original Melrose Place apartment complex returned for the revival. Melrose Place creator Darren Star did not participate in the update, leaving screenwriters Todd Slavkin and Darren Swimmer as showrunners. (Star told Vulture in 2024 that he considers Hollywood’s reboot fixation “terrible,” adding, “I’d rather fail with a fresh idea than do a reboot. It feels like a product.”)

The newer Melrose only featured two returning stars at first: Laura Leighton as Sydney Andrews and Thomas Calabro as Michael Mancini. Eventually, Josie Bissett and Daphne Zuniga guest-starred in later episodes, reprising their roles as Jane Andrews and Jo Reynolds, respectively. The CW eventually got Heather Locklear, who had resisted returning to the role of Amanda Woodward, to join the revival halfway through the season.

The revival instead filled its cast with relative unknowns, including Katie Cassidy, Stephanie Jacobsen, Michael Rady, and Jessica Lucas. Ashlee Simpson was probably the only series-regular cast member with name recognition. And unlike stars of the original Melrose Place, including Marcia Cross, Kristin Davis, Lisa Rinna, and Alyssa Milano, none of the revival’s cast members have become household names.

It was met with jeers by critics.

The Melrose revival also didn’t make much of an impression with critics. The Star-Ledger’s Alan Sepinwall said the show “embraces what it is: a trashy remake of one of the most memorably trashy hits in primetime history.” IGN’s Amanda Sloane Murray said it’s “one guilty pleasure you won’t have to feel too guilty about.” But USA Today’s Robert Blanco said the cast was “your typical CW collection of pretty, hard-bodied young things, most of whom can’t act their way out of a Birkin bag.”

Fans weren’t taken by the twists.

The biggest for the show’s success, however, seemed to be that the revival’s bids for watercooler immortality were a wash. Viewers just reacted to twists and turns with shrugs. The series premiere resurrected Sydney only to kill her off again, leaving her lifeless body floating in the pool in the first 10 minutes to kick off an overarching mystery, but a portion of the premiere’s audience didn’t even finish the episode. Similarly, Locklear’s Amanda made her villainous debut in Episode 10, but Melrose Place’s ratings continued to fall.

Cast member Colin Egglesfield told TV Insider in 2022 that the revival had a bit of an identity crisis, trying to be too much to too many people. “I think what happened with Melrose Place was it was so different from the original,” he said. “The original was a bunch of 20- and 30-year-olds living in an apartment complex in L.A. It was more about the relationship between these six people and dating and their jobs. … The reboot was a bit too ambitious. It was almost like three or four different shows crammed into one. I think they tried too much. People didn’t know how to connect with it. That’s why it didn’t resonate.”

What does this mean for the next Melrose Place series?

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So, could Hollywood learn from the mistakes of 2009’s Melrose Place? As of April 2024, another Melrose reboot was being shopped around to networks and streamers, with Locklear, Leighton and Zuniga attached, as Deadline reported at the time.

“This is gonna be different because it’s the original cast,” Bissett said of a planned reboot in a 2021 interview with The Seattle Times. “Melrose is a tough show to reboot unless it’s with the original people.”

Even with more O.G. stars on board, another Melrose would have its work cut out for it, according to original cast member Jack Wagner. “I don’t think it’s easy,” Wagner told Us Weekly last month. “I really don’t think it’s easy to take such a huge show like Melrose Place and try to recreate it. It’s tough.”

Yeah, just ask The CW!