And here we thought that Josie Bissett had made a clean escape from "Melrose Place."
But the actress has been sucked back into all the back-stabbing, deceit and depravity that is "Melrose." Bissett returns to her role as Jane Mancini in the episode scheduled to air Monday, Aug. 17.(New episodes of the show begin airing on Monday.)
"After a few hours, I felt like I'd never left," Bissett said. "It was pretty funny how that happened. A lot of the crew is still there. Most of the cast is different. But most of my stuff was with Thomas (Calabro), so it was very familiar."
That's right. After all these years, Jane and Michael (Calabro's character) are going to get together one more time. Sparks will fly when they run into each other at a class reunion.
When "Melrose Place" began, the Mancinis were the happily married young couple - and both (they and the show) were really quite boring.
"I don't think we found our niche that early on," Bissett said. "And when we were that nice couple, that didn't last very long. As soon as the craziness began on `Melrose,' that's when the show found its niche. And we'll never lose that."
"It started out as a drama and it's turned into a comedy, but it still has some seriousness to it. I think it's the unrealistic things that happen that people really enjoy watching and get into," Bissett said.
And, like the rest of the characters, Jane's odyssey was certainly bizarre. There was the time she and her sister, Sydney (the since-departed Laura Leighton) buried a guy alive. (Of course, they didn't know he was alive when they buried him.) And, after she lost her business, Jane set an ex-boyfriend's business on fire. Of course, she might have had some excuse for that - the ex-boyfriend did rape her.
"Things happened really quickly," Bissett said. "One minute I was nice, the next minute I was a crazy b----. It's just the nature of the show, I think. Things happen quicker on TV."
But, eventually, Bissett tired of the grind of the prime-time soap opera.
"I wasn't happy," Bissett said. "I just felt like it was time to take a break. And (executive producer) Aaron (Spelling) was so nice about it and so sweet with me. He said, `Oh, Josie, we're not going to kill you. We want you to come back someday, but I'm going to let you go.' So he really took care of me."
Oddly enough, just after Bissett left the show her real-life husband, Rob Estes, joined the cast as Kyle.
"With Rob being there, I sort of still had that connection. And then as far as watching the show, I mean, I only watched it when Rob and Heather (Locklear) had love scenes," she said with a laugh.
During the year and a half or so that Bissett was away, she made a couple of TV movies. It was while she accompanied Estes on location for a TV movie he was starring in that the couple started talking about the possibility that Bissett might return to "Melrose." And she mentioned that discussion to her manager.
"And it just snowballed," Bissett said. "And within two weeks, there was a script and I was back on the show."
For anyone who ever watched the show, Jane's return will be about as loopy as anything "Melrose Place" has ever done. The simple fact that Jane is going to get involved with her ex-husband, Michael, again strains credulity past the breaking point.
Michael, of course, has been a psycho more often than not and did innumerable horrible things to Jane both during and after their marriage.
But Michael's going to do one of those complete character turn-arounds that have been part and parcel of the "Melrose" style of writing.
"It's interesting that she accepts him back, with everything that he's done to her," Bissett said. "Jane and Michael believe they're really one and each other's true love.
"We have a really interesting relationship this time. You're going to start to see a little bit of a softer side to Michael. "
Of course, this being "Melrose Place," don't expect them to live happily ever after for long.
"You'll eventually see a triangle with Jane and someone from her past who starts to sort of stir things up between the three of them," Bissett said.
Whether her own character will take another wild swing remains to be seen. But Bissett is hoping Jane will remain fairly well grounded.
"I would like to keep Jane a sweet, nice, honorable character. I don't want her to be a victim, which is what happened before," Bissett said.
And she'll need to be tough. Jane is going to work for Amanda (Lock-lear) at the advertising firm.
To this point, Bissett and Estes haven't had much onscreen time together.
"We have had some," she said. "It's usually just sort of passing-by scenes or scenes in the bar with the group, which you're going to see a lot more next season. "
There's been no indication that Jane and Kyle are going to get involved with each other.
"I have enough of that in my real life," Bissett said with a laugh.
And the couple tries to leave "Melrose Place" behind them when they leave the set.
"We really don't talk about it when we get home," she said. "We play with our dogs and we're dorks. Once we leave the show, we really don't (talk about it). Unless we run lines. A lot of times, right before we go to sleep, we'll run our lines for the next time."
With Josie often reading the lines written for Locklear's Amanda.
"Yeah, I get on top of him and untuck my shirt," she joked.