The answer, of course, is that she will have an extremely convenient miscarriage. This plot arc aired in the mid-1990s, when abortion wasn’t really an option for characters on television shows. If a series even openly discussed abortion, it risked the ire of highly organized media watchdogs on the religious right who would lead boycotts and threaten skittish advertisers. Yet if you look closely at “101 Damnations,” the Melrose Place episode in which Alison miscarries, you might notice something quite odd: There is a reference to abortion in the episode. It’s just visual instead of spoken. Through much of the episode, Alison Parker is draped in a quilt that bears the chemical structure of RU-486, the so-called abortion pill.
For three years, as the denizens of the Melrose Place apartment complex loved, lost, and betrayed one another, the GALA Committee smuggled subversive leftist art onto the set, experimenting with the relationship between art, artist, and spectator. The collective hid its work in plain sight and operated in secrecy.
Brilliant, I love the concept.
Jeffrey