I watched the original Melrose Place for about a year. The show premiered in the summer of 1992, when I was 18, and the main reason I started watching it is because I read that there was going to be a gay character. (He turned out to be totally boring, but I took what I could get.) When I went back to college for my second year, a bunch of us would get together to watch it every Tuesday night.

For the first few months, it wasn’t a trashy soap opera. There were no villains, no killings, no amnesia. Episodes didn’t end with cliffhangers. It was just a one-hour drama about a bunch of 20somethings trying to get by in Los Angeles, and it was a bit more realistic (by TV standards, anyway) than it eventually became. Once it got all trashy and unbelievable, I lost interest. I rarely watched it after that first year.

The new version of Melrose Place premieres tonight. I’m going to tune in to the first episode and probably get bored after the first few minutes and turn it off. But in tribute to the old series, here are the original first-season credits, with that theme music that takes me back to 1992. See how buddy-buddy everyone is? Nobody was trying to kill each other! Bill Clinton and Al Gore were campaigning across the country by bus! What a great time.