But watching this, I realized that none of it was as interesting to me as Harley's name, which, having been coined with her in mind, distills the classic Heather Locklear character down to its purest, most irreducible essence. The name says everything we think of when we think of Heather Locklear: She's strong. Capricious. She's unpredictable. She's a fast machine who keeps her motor clean.

Watching Heather Locklear sashay onto the screen, the camera trained on her hips, it occurred to me that Heather Locklear has been sashaying across the screen since I was first allowed to watch the kinds of shows that starred Heather Locklear.

If, like mine, your coming of age intersected with the Locklear ascendancy, you probably know more about her career and personal life than is strictly seemly. (She was married to Tommy Lee.) In your defense, the wellspring of Locklear-related data in your brain is mostly an accident of timing, geography and whatever pacts Aaron Spelling once made with the forces of darkness.

More than a TV star, Heather Locklear is a premium brand. There is no fictional role that could overtake her in terms of sheer name recognition. (There was another big-haired Heather once, on another tough-guy show, but she was creamed by the competition.) Through some alchemy of hair, teeth, Bambi eyes, business suits, cattiness, good-natured self-mockery and toothsome force of will, Locklear has remained on screen for more than two decades while managing to avoid the purgatorial pitfall of the successful TV actor; that is, being swallowed whole by some network's depressing idea of a lovable character.

And for that, every time she sees a bus stamped with the thumb-flashing likeness of "Joey" on it, she must be grateful.

Instead, the Heather Locklear character, which Locklear reprises in "LAX," is a relatively static persona that has proved remarkably adaptive across TV genres. (This, admittedly, doesn't say much for TV genres.) She did have a short trajectory, from Sanrio-featured ingenue to blond-ambition executive, but all in all she has made a long, happy career out of being neither terribly versatile nor particularly deep.

In the 23 years she has been on TV, she has played some minor variation of the Heather Locklear character on prime-time soaps, dramas and sitcoms. She shilled shampoo and toothpaste in the late 1970s, landed a part as Krystle Carrington's NASCAR niece Sammy Jo Dean on "Dynasty" in 1981, got the part of Officer Stacy Sheridan on "T.J. Hooker" a year later, then returned to "Dynasty" for its third season, becoming first to star in two simultaneous hit prime-time series.

Of course, it's a law of network physics that any organism exposed to the camera eventually must be reduced to its essence. But the Heather Locklear role has historical dimension. It has functioned as the control group in a two-decade-long experiment in evolving TV stereotypes. Looking back on it, her resume contains more cultural artifacts than a pre-Columbian tomb. She was softer and more cheesecake-y as a beat cop in the early '80s (a role she'd never be cast in as a young actress today, at least not with that hair) than she was as a miniskirted ad executive in the early '90s. Stacy Sheridan was nothing if not some painful absurd early-Boomer notion of the "girl cop" — a good daughter and a loyal protege and hard-working junior-level employee with a sunny disposition along with a fondness for extra-short gym shorts and tight uniforms.

Meanwhile, as the ambitious, conniving trailer park orphan Sammy Jo, she was allowed to explore the other side of her sex appeal.

Heather Locklear has managed to endure the past 23 years by reprising the same general character in a variety of TV settings. NBC

In the past decade or so, following her florid turn as id-monster Amanda Woodward on "Melrose Place" and a crafty campaign manager on "Spin City," Heather Locklear has acquired a mystical, if not messianic, aura in the minds of executives. On a recent "E! True Hollywood Story," NBC Chief Jeff Zucker referred to Locklear's perceived power to heal moribund TV shows as "the Heather Locklear effect."

"Every time she shows up," he said, "there's success." Then again, network executives have been known to ascribe mystical qualities to their own repetition compulsion.

Television actors' abilities are often concentrated in their hard candy outer shell, and more than any other medium, TV has the power to stuff a star, a worldview, a formula down your throat until your liver bursts. The staying power of Heather Locklear could be attributed to the constant casting of Heather Locklear — a consequence of indoctrination, not voodoo.

What's interesting is not how long the Heather Locklear character has lasted. It's how subtly it has shifted from latently dangerous object of desire to latently desirable object of fear. But Harley's sexuality is as sharp and icy as Stacy's was coyly kittenish and Sammy Jo's was coquettish and presentational. It's an intellectual abstraction.

Ever since Heather Locklear put on a suit and strode into the (nonlaw-enforcing) TV workplace in the early '90s as the office queen bee, she has been inching toward a new kind of daunting sexuality.

No one who gets involved with her need fear becoming mired in her plasmatic womanly emotions. They need to worry about getting fired without an explanation. Heather Locklear is the Joan Collins of our generation. But she's nobody's overbearing mother.