New Show Spotlight: Melrose Place

With the new Fall schedules being announced this week, Celebrity Bug will spend the next couple of weeks giving you the first hand scoop on TV's newest shows.

In an elegant Spanish-style apartment building in the trendy Melrose neighborhood of Los Angeles, a diverse group of 20-somethings have formed a close-knit surrogate family.

Sydney Andrews (Laura Leighton, the original "Melrose Place") is the landlady, still beautiful at 40, and a central figure in the lives of all her tenants, especially handsome and rebellious David Breck (Shaun Sipos, "Shark"). Sydney started an affair with David despite her turbulent history with his estranged father, Dr. Michael Mancini (Thomas Calabro, the original "Melrose Place"). Both father and son learned through experience that Sydney was not above using blackmail to control people.

Another tenant, high-powered publicist Ella Simms (Katie Cassidy, "Supernatural"), once considered Sydney her mentor, but their friendship was destroyed by betrayal, and Sydney threatened to evict Ella and ruin her career. Sydney also played a pivotal role in the career of Auggie Kirkpatrick (Colin Egglesfield, "All My Children"). After they met at an AA meeting, she became Auggie's sponsor and encouraged his dream to become a chef. Now a successful sous chef at the trendy restaurant Coal, Auggie has been avoiding Sydney since she began drinking again. The other tenants include Lauren Yung (Stephanie Jacobsen, "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles"), a medical student in desperate need of money to pay her student loans, and Jonah Miller (Michael Rady, "Swingtown"), an aspiring filmmaker who has just proposed to his live-in girlfriend Riley Richmond (Jessica Lucas, "Cloverfield"), a first-grade teacher.

The newest tenant, 18-year-old Violet Foster (Ashlee Simpson-Wentz, "7th Heaven"), has just arrived in LA with her own secret connection to Sydney. When a bloody body is found floating in the courtyard pool, David is the leading suspect. However, as the police are soon to discover, almost everyone living at Melrose Place had a reason to want the deceased out of the way.

An updated version of the popular 1990s series, Melrose Place is from CBS Television Studios with executive producers Todd Slavkin & Darren Swimmer ("Smallville"). Oscar-winner Davis Guggenheim ("An Inconvenient Truth") is the director and executive producer of the pilot.

Melrose Place, will air Tuesdays this fall on The CW.

Extended Promo (Update):


As an avid fan of the original, I must say I am looking forward to the remake, even though the above clip featured a handful of bad acting and did very little to disguise who ends up floating in the pool. In addition, what seems to be missing, as it was for half of the original show's first season, is that bitchy character that you just love to hate, in other words, Amanda Woodward.