It's usually hard to pinpoint the exact moment when a network fell to crap, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the end of FOX falls in the spring of 1999. Ending its seven-season run, Aaron Spelling's addictive Melrose Place became 90210 for grown ups. After the departure of Beverly Hills darlin' Kelly Taylor, who had been dating a Melrose resident, MP showed twentysomethings just what they were missing: a sideburn-less, back-stabbing, husband-stealing, pool-sex-having, apartment complex rife with impurity and where unattractive people are all but nonexistent. A primetime serial the likes of which had been missing since the days of Dallas MP proved, yet again, what white people want to watch: pretty white people living lives of not-so-quiet desperation, hatching plots centering on characters returning from the dead, lobotomies, split personalities, and apartment bombings.
In order to maintain a guise of legitimacy, several members of the MP production team helped form the GALA Committee. GALA brought a much-needed sense of "art" to the set, slipping in original artworks as props throughout the show's fourth and fifth seasons. And to ensure its audience was intellectually stimulated, the artwork often bore political subtext; for example, when Allison is pregnant her blanket pattern is the molecular structure of RU-486 (aka: the morning after pill). (Wouldn’t some sort of safe sex message have made more sense?)
MP's white cred has been cemented with shout-outs on several other series including Seinfeld and Friends. The show has since been banished to SOAPNet syndication and DVD obscurity.
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