Melrose Place executive producer Charles Pratt says the show never got an eighth season, in part because Fox couldn’t afford star Heather Locklear’s salary.
Pratt joined Melrose alums Courtney Thorne-Smith, Daphne Zuniga and Laura Leighton on the most recent episode of their re-watch podcast Still the Place, where he reflected on the hit primetime drama’s revolving cast and its series finale.
Pratt explained that the soapy nature of Melrose Place meant that the show’s writers would run out of over-the-top storylines for the characters, forcing them to bring in new ones.
“We ran you through a soap mill,” he told the hosts. “You know, marriages and, you know, deaths and crime.”
While Pratt said he loved “every person we brought on,” he still “took it, like, personally every time” a veteran member of the cast left.
By the end of the show’s fifth season, Thorne-Smith, Zuniga and Leighton had all departed. But, according to Pratt, Locklear was irreplaceable in the eyes of the network.
“I think the feeling was at Fox, as long as Heather’s on the show, it doesn’t matter who else is on the show,” he explained.
“I know why it was canceled, why we didn’t get an eighth season, which we really wanted,” Pratt said. Along with declining ratings, he explained, Melrose Place had become “tainted” by actress Hunter Tylo’s lawsuit claiming the show’s producers had fired her before she filmed any scenes because she was pregnant.
“And quite frankly, they said, ‘We can’t afford to pay Heather Locklear,’ ” Pratt added.
Pratt, who wrote and directed Melrose Place’s May 1999 series finale, described the episode as “so sad.”
“I made sure the last shot was of Heather,” he said.
Pratt also revealed that he’d wanted to bring back several characters for the finale, including Thorne-Smith’s Alison Parker.
“They wanted me to come back,” the actress confirmed. “I was working on Ally McBeal at the time, and that schedule was crazy, and we just couldn’t make it work.”
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Pratt said he’d also hoped to bring back Andrew Shue, who left Melrose Place after season 6, as Alison’s on-again-off-again love interest Billy Campbell for the finale along with Marcia Cross’ Kimberly Shaw.
“She was dead,” the hosts pointed out. Cross’s character was felled by terminal brain cancer in the show’s sixth season.
While Pratt said he regretted not being able to get Thorne-Smith and Shue back for the finale, he made sure to include two empty bar stools in a party scene in the finale as a tribute to their characters’ absence.
“It was gonna be a Billy and Allison moment,” he explained. “And I thought, ‘I’ll always know what that means.’ ”
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