Looking Back On My Melrose Place Matrix

So it’s pretty clear that
I love The OC, despite its
geography flaws. But
c’mon — The OC is simply
Melrose Place further south in Southern California. And
I loved Melrose Place. I loved it so much that it turned out to be the single
most popular thing I ever did when I worked in newspapers.

Most of my work at the Los Angeles Times and later the
Orange County
Register was spent doing graphics reporting. If a plane crashed, an earthquake
happened, some new virtual reality project was coming online, I’d did the
reporting like an ordinary reporter would. Then I’d get with an artist to
figure out how to illustrate the story. Once we had a concept down, they would
do the great graphics, and I’d be doing the text along the way.

I have a fun portfolio of work. I talked with Buzz Aldrin to do a graphic on
his ideas of getting back into space; helped illustrate the big Midwest floods
of 1994 from a far; drove under broken freeway overpasses to help illustrate the
Northridge Quake of 1994; explained how traffic signals worked; documented the
big Laguna Beach fire; landslides in Anaheim and on and on.

My Melrose Place graphic beat all of those. I produced it when I worked at
the Orange County Register, and Melrose was picking up steam. The entertainment
section was doing a story and wanted a graphic. I was ready to go with my
Melrose Matrix:

That’s the whole thing above, but I’ll do some breakouts below, as it’s hard
to read. We ran this in the Orange County Register, and then it went out over
the Knight-Ridder wire. To my art director’s surprise and amazement, it ended up
in almost 50 newspapers nationwide. It was amazement I shared as well. We’d do
all this hard work on "big" topics with heavy news value that some papers would
pick up — but Melrose hits a home run? You’ve got to love popular culture.

I wanted to introduce each character, but there was so much to say and so
little space. That why we needed symbols for key things like backstabbing or
pregnancy:

Then I dived into a synopsis of each person on the show at the time:

The heart of the graphic was the big matrix that let you see what each
character thought of each other. The summary is below. Click on it to pop open a
new window that’s easier to read.

Every graphic needs a source line. Normally they’re pretty boring, but I got
to have fun with this one:

FYI, among my treasured items is Marcia Cross’s autograph that a friend of my
got when she Marcia came to her table in a restaurant back during her Melrose
days. I love how she and Doug Savant (Matt) get to be reunited on Desperate
Housewives.