Heather Locklear joins the cast of the resuscitated version of “Melrose Place” on Nov. 17.

In the seven seasons Heather Locklear spent on “Melrose Place,” the vintage-1990s Fox soap opera, she was synonymous with ruthlessness, deviousness and hemlines that rose as high as prime-time television would allow.

So when she returned to a resuscitated version of “Melrose Place” that began this fall on the CW network, Locklear considered making a few demands. Starting with her skirts.

“They’re short,” Locklear said in a telephone interview, “and I keep wanting to say, ‘Shorter,’ but I have to work into that, because I think wardrobe might be mortified.”

It has been nearly 17 years since Locklear, 48, first wriggled her way into the tantalizing garb of Amanda Woodward, the coldblooded — or, depending on your perspective, determined — advertising executive who imbued the original “Melrose Place” with a sense of backstabbing, hair-pulling purpose.

Locklear knows that not every strategy from her old playbook will work on the new show, which she joins on Nov. 17. She’s now an unlikely elder stateswoman in a cast of mostly 20-somethings — not to mention a mom — and what was risque in her heyday is now tame by even network television standards. But as she did the first time around, she approaches the over-the-top melodrama with a healthy dose of irony.

“I really was winking at the audience,” she said. “As I stood there watching everything going around me, I tried to go: ‘This is crazy. I’m normal.’”

As Amanda, Locklear compensated and then some: She seduced several of the show’s male characters, helped orchestrate the buyout of the advertising agency where she worked and drove its ex-president to suicide, overcame lymphoma and was revealed to have faked her own death. The 1999 series finale seemed to suggest that Amanda and a paramour (played by Jack Wagner) were killed in an explosion — then showed the two walking blissfully on a beach.

When the “Smallville” producers Darren Swimmer and Todd Slavkin were approached by CW to restart “Melrose Place,” they said their approach would mostly emphasize a new cast of characters — with one exception.

“Heather Locklear is so synonymous with the franchise,” Slavkin said. “Amanda Woodward is the one character we felt could be folded in, in a much bigger way, to make the show more accessible.”

In her initial conversations with the producers, Locklear was not convinced. “I thought, Is that a good idea?” she said. “Has it been long enough and does anyone care anymore? It was hard to see what they were really going to do.”

But after the new show had its debut on Sept. 8, and Locklear saw how it integrated other “Melrose Place” veterans like Thomas Calabro (who plays the conniving Dr. Michael Mancini) and Laura Leighton (who portrays the husband-stealing, one-time mental patient Sydney Andrews), she had a change of heart. So Amanda Woodward will return from her desert island hideout, having dumped the boyfriend she left there. (“You can’t stay on one thing for too long,” Locklear said. “Yawn.”)