Melrose Place.

• Author: Rapping, Elayne

If one wants to understand the appeal of Jane Austen and the Brontes at the cineplex, one need only check out what is perhaps the most popular of all current dramatic series on TV with young women these days: Melrose Place. This show brings throngs of young women together, at bars, in dorm lounges, in living rooms, all over America, to share pizza and an hour of very un-Austenian pleasure each Wednesday evening. It may be the only show on television in which perfect gender equality, personal and professional, has actually been achieved.

And the picture it presents of this much-demanded state of affairs--as played out in the context of our current, dominant cultural norms and values--is anything but attractive. It's so terrifying that any woman in her right mind would gladly flee to Jane Austen country to escape its manic, madhouse miseries.

Melrose Place started out as a very warm-hearted, even progressive-minded series about a bunch of young singles negotiating the job and relationship world,

They were straight and gay, black and white. They worked McJobs and worried over unwanted pregnancies and the perils of single parenting. They volunteered at soup kitchens and literacy programs. They cared about each other and helped each other out. It was sweet but low-key, and the ratings didn't rise high or quickly enough for Aaron Spelling.

His solution? Bring in Heather Locklear, a veteran from Spelling's 1980s hit series Dynasty, to play the part of a scheming, conniving, amoral advertising

executive who chewed up competitors and sexual partners as voraciously as she chewed her power bars. Ratings soared and the show and its characters and situations have metamorphosed into a near-mythic cultural phenomenon. The world of Melrose Place today is one in which sexual and financial negotiations and relationships are fast-paced, brutal, permanently unstable and shifting and--here is where the Jane Austen contrast is most vivid--completely devoid of any sense of rules, limits, or boundaries.

For those who decry the limits of essentialist assumptions about gender traits, here is a world in which no such assumptions hold, in any way, shape, or form. Women and men share similarly rapacious, individualist, conniving genes--temporarily anyway--and then they morph, male and female alike, into the opposites, suddenly becoming caring, loving, vulnerable, sensitive, and altruistic. For even in the realm of psychology and personality, there are no rules or...