First Jo left. Then Jane. Then Alison. Jake, too. Finally, even Billy - dear, dim-bulb Billy - moved on. And then, well, did it really matter anymore?

Not really. And this spring it'll cease to matter at all: Melrose Place - the trashy, campy and ultimately defining prime-time soap of the Gen X-era - has been served its eviction notice. And a generation mourns.

Fox posted the closing sign Friday - the same day ABC finally gave up on Home Improvement. No word on its final air date. But this much is clear: Melrose will expire, the network said, at the end of this season - after seven TV years, 227 episodes and innumerable Heather Locklear micro-miniskirts. Cause of death: The usual. Lousy ratings.

But other contributing factors cannot be ignored, chiefly: If Melrose Place really was the defining soap of the Gen X-era, then understand that the Gen X-era itself is dead - squeezed out by Generation Y and all the Sarah Michelle Love Van Der Beek thangs of Dawson's Creek, et al. Demographics all but demand that the generation once overshadowed and outnumbered by baby boomers will be overshadowed and outnumbered by the spawn of the baby boomers. Goodbye, Melrose Place. Hello, Felicity.

In announcing Melrose's demise, Fox deigned it a "pop culture icon of the '90s." Put another way: The 1990s end in 11 months. Time to shove the old lady off the iceberg before the new millennium.

"I will miss it and everyone involved very much," executive producer Aaron Spelling said in a statement.

Melrose premiered on July 8, 1992, a spinoff of Beverly Hills, 90210 (which is looking more and more like it may eke out another season.) In the beginning, it was a tame, episodic look at the lives and loves of twentysomethings in a Los Angeles apartment complex. Think Marcus Welby with a swimming pool.

Midway through the first season, Spelling enlisted T.J. Hooker/Dynasty alum Heather Locklear to goose the soft ratings and scare the bejesus out of the nice-people likes of Alison (Courtney Thorne-Smith), Billy (Andrew Shue) and Jake (Grant Show). Locklear was Amanda Woodward, the advertising-industry barracuda who never met a washcloth she couldn't accessorize into acceptable office attire. Her short-term "special guest star" run never ended.

But as is the way of soaps, cast turnover is inevitable and, eventually, deadening. Daphne Zuniga as Jo the photographer left in 1996, Josie Bissett as good wife Jane left in 1997, Thorne-Smith, Show and Doug Savant (as Matt, the sensitive, and, yes, gay social worker) followed her out the door. Shue moved out last season. Dozens of other actors moved in and out of the series' revolving beds. In 1994, Melrose birthed its own spinoff series, the short-lived Models Inc.

Bissett returned to her old address this season, but it was too little, too late. The show is averaging a weak 4.8 rating. (Each rating point equals 980,000 TV homes.) Thomas Calabro as psycho doctor Michael Mancini was the only cast member to survive from Day One.

"Melrose Place is one of my all-time favorite shows," Spelling said.