Well, Ally might droop. Advertising executive Amanda speeds to her office in a hot little car while her neglected, disappointed husband, Kyle, hurls a rock at her windshield. This is after she yelled at him, "I have too much ambition for you and you can't deal with it! You can't keep up!" She's right about that. How's he going to keep up if he hasn't even gotten around to putting on his shoes?

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Watching Kyle, and Peter, Michael, Craig, Jake, Billy and Bobby before him, try to keep up with Amanda and her ambitions has been the central pleasure of "Melrose Place" for most of its seven years, ever since Aaron Spelling brought his former "Dynasty" sweetheart Heather Locklear to the show. Personally, I don't go much for the TV blonds. But Heather's Amanda, like Laura Palmer and Buffy Summers, is an exception. Saying goodbye to Amanda on May 24, the series finale, will be like losing a little part of myself. I've spent the better part of my 20s, in between climbing up my own ladder, watching Amanda's rise to power. I debuted in the for-keeps work world around the same time she showed up on TV. And we were greener then, the both of us -- a little clunkier, a little more confused. Sure, I have more of an ethics hangup than she does, and I prefer crisp white sheets to that laughable leopardskin bedding she's so fond of. But I like to think we could have been seated at the same table at a League of Women Voters luncheon and carried on a conversation.

The image of "Melrose Place" is that it's all about sex and Saturday nights in Southern California. But ultimately, beneath its veneer of lingerie, the program has become increasingly more about work, business acumen and let's not forget greed. It's about ambition. No matter how much the sleeping around became a continual game of musical chairs -- Michael has not only slept with every woman on the show, he's married most of them -- nearly all the characters spent far more time trying to get ahead in advertising, medicine and fashion design than they ever spent on their crush of the week. This is a Monday show in every sense of the word. While the early years were a little more youthful and casual -- the gang hung out at biker Jake's grungy bar Shooter's -- recent seasons have shifted the after-work scene to Kyle's hideously grown-up jazz club.

If the love stuff on the show used to be more "Penthouse" magazine, it has gradually become something straight out of "Brides." For years now, there's been a wedding seemingly every third episode. I didn't realize how conservative the show had become until earlier in this season, when Jane had a one-night stand with someone she'd just met. It was a shocking aberration. Only the people who don't watch "Melrose Place" -- an increasingly gigantic demographic, hence the cancellation -- think its all orgy, all the time. They're the only ones who think it's one of those sociological AIDS-era reactions in which Americans watch sex on TV since sex in real life kills. Maybe if the show actually was about that, it wouldn't have lost its cultural clout. Earlier in the decade, young urban professional types gathered in living rooms and bars to watch the show together as some fin de siècle bonding ritual. But nobody wants to go to a bar straight from work at the ad agency and see if Amanda lands her big account. Trust me, to still watch "Melrose Place" in 1999 is a silent, solitary affair.

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