Daphne Zuniga reveals the ‘Melrose Place’ storyline she felt was too ‘over the top’

Daphne Zuniga’s Jo Reynolds was put through a lot throughout her four seasons on Melrose Place. But for Zuniga, one storyline took it a touch too far.

“You know, the thing about Jo’s baby,” Zuniga said on a recent episode of the Melrose Place rewatch podcast Still The Place, in response to a fan question about “the storyline your character was involved in that your first thought was, ‘Wow, this is over the top, even for Melrose.'”

The actress explained, “Jo has a baby, then it’s kidnapped. I mean, I was on David Letterman once. I couldn’t keep up with where the baby went. It was kidnapped. Then I got him back. Then he was stolen again. Then finally I gave him up in the end. It’s like, that was over the top, you know?”

The kidnapping storyline is one of the prime dramas of the beloved soap’s third season and indeed involves enough revelations and reversals of expectation to make your head spin. Jo’s baby with the late Reed Carter (James Wilder) is first sought by his parents, so Kimberly (Marcia Cross) helps fake its death, but instead kidnaps the child, which doesn’t last long because the Carters hire a nanny to kidnap the baby back. Jo eventually reaches her limit after getting shot and gives the child up for adoption.

Zuniga clarified her comments: “We enjoy the drama, but this is when the world loved the show, when it was so over the top. They loved it.”

Her cohost and former costar Laura Leighton agreed, admitting the wilder storylines were “super fun. But a lot of the times, I would ask myself, ‘Oh my gosh, really? Is this… I mean, isn’t this over the top?’ Then somehow it managed to be exactly what the audience wanted.”

Leighton played the impulsive Sydney Andrews across five seasons of Melrose Place. If anyone had reason to be scared to open next week’s scripts and find out what they entailed for their character, it was Leighton.

“I thought that Sydney often had the, ‘Oh, you want to do something wacky? Let’s give it to Sydney.'” So I would read the script and go, ‘Really?’ she said. “I was a stripper first, then to a cult, then became a madam” to “a call girl out of desperation.”

If that wasn’t enough, Leighton added, “I think I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the fact that Jane (Josie Bissett) and Sydney buried Richard (Patrick Muldoon) alive. So that was a big spoiler, people — for those of you who haven’t watched Melrose yet, that’s coming.”

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Zuniga reminded listeners who may have found these over-the-top storylines a bit too indulgent that “we didn’t have say, you know. We just had to read it and make it work. That was our job. So it was like, season 2 and 3, you started to go, ‘This is going to be over the top more and more and more and more.”

Melrose Place certainly had a higher melodrama to drama ratio by season 3 than it had in the comparatively quiet first season. But the show’s ratings were as high as they could be during peak crazy, from seasons 2-4.

Zuniga and Leighton were not joined by their usual cohost Courtney Thorne Smith. The actresses explained that each of the women have been evacuated from their homes as a result of the ongoing Palisades Fire in Los Angeles, with Smith still “waiting to hear about her home.”