Entertainment

‘MELROSE’ ALL PARTIED OUT – SOAP REACHES END OF ITS TANGLED ROPE

AMANDA deserved better.

Peter and Kyle and Jane and Ryan and Megan deserved better. Hell, even Michael, Lexi and Eve deserved better than the send-off they got from last night’s “Melrose Place.”

As writer-director Charles Pratt Jr. tried to wrap up too many strings unnecessarily tangled over the last few painful weeks, we found ourselves alternately wondering why anyone had bothered and straining to connect the dots between this overworked soap at the end of its rope and the old “Melrose” that had been a national phenomenon.

The party ended with so much nonsense going on that the key storylines we might have no, should have, cared about got a bummer of a rush.

Amanda (Heather Locklear, who must not have swung much of her producer’s weight around) and Peter (Jack Wagner) did – as supermarket tabloids had blared months ago – skip the country just ahead of the cops trying to pin an unjustified embezzlement rap on him and a perhaps murder rap on her.

‘Course, they had time to arrange a) hospital cadavers, b) false dental records, c) a gas explosion, d) delivery of Amanda’s cherished locket to Kyle.

‘Course, Kyle (Rob Estes) and Jane (Josie Bisset, Estes’ real-life wife and one of the original “Melrose” players) had time to put on a big beach funeral complete with urns that make it easy for Eve (Rena Sofer) to make an ash out of Lexi (Jamie Luner) hours after Peter and Amanda “died” in the explosion.

And only a couple of hours later later, before Kyle and Jane had a chance to tell everyone that the baby (Michael’s) is a girl, the doorbell rings and, whoa!, there’s the locket Amanda promised she’d give back to Kyle if they ever had a baby.

Michael (Thomas Calabro), last seen in the company of a nurse right out of a Playboy cartoon, was right. Musta been something in the water scooped out of the pool and bottled for kitsch and cash value by Aaron Spelling’s team.

Ah, that pool. Can we talk? Michael, accompanied by the world’s worst therapist and a doped up judge, all of them chest deep in water, getting jilted by Lexi (Jamie Luner)?

Let Nancy O’Dell tell her “Access Hollywood” viewers she made a cameo appearance.

And let Eve, who told her newest cellmate that she’d “always relied on the kindness of cheerleaders,” know that the game’s over.