Desperate Housewives – Sundays on ABC
ABC network is blowing its horn about the two best shows that are on TV this season – “Lost”, and “Desperate Housewives”. Sure, you won’t get any argument from me about “Lost” – well written, well-shot, intense, mysterious, and overall a good shot of adrenaline for a Wednesday night show. However, the second show – which I’ve been trying to appreciate and love for the past month – just doesn’t do it for me. Maybe I have to be a housewife in order to “click”? Or, maybe the show is just bad, and no amount of spin and publicity is going to save it. Here’s what I think:
When this show premiered a few weeks ago, I welcomed it with open arms. C’mon, Terri Hatcher (Susan), Marcia Cross (Bree), Nicolette Sheridan (Edie), and a suicide mystery right from the very first minutes got me hooked. Whether a show will mock the suburbs, or play their soap opera with a straight face, it sounded promising, and funny. Indeed, the first couple of episodes gave me (and my wife) tons of laughs, along the lines of “these people, with their income, experience, age, cannot accomplish this or that simple task? Oh, the social satire, ha-ha-ha”. Yes, a dramedy (I would call it a comedy if it was funny more often) that deals with suburban boredom, dark secrets, idle kids, lawn care competitions, along with a scandal was something I could tune in to watch week after week. ‘Cause looking outside my window isn’t enough of a commentary on suburbia.
Well, this past week I have had enough with Desperate Housewives. My wife keeps watching the show, either out of pity, or to spite me, and perhaps she’s right – you gotta be a woman, or a parent to understand this show, and to identify with these women. OK, so I am a guy, but I do have a small kid, shouldn’t it help in “understanding”? Besides, I don’t think the show is intended to be “a chick show”, so perhaps I’m just different, and am not intended to be the target audience. Which is fine by me – there are plenty of good shows on TV, and I can bravely stop recording this particular time slot, and free up some Sunday night for myself. Except that I really believe this show is aimed at couples, and should work regardless of gender.
So why am I tuning out? For starters, the mockery of suburbia has quickly become a caricature. It’s one thing to mock real events that happen in a small community (the Simpsons have been doing that for over a decade). But when well-rounded characters become flatter and flatter with each episode, things get boring. For instance, Susan (Teri Hatcher) is clearly lusting after the new neighbor Mike (James Henton), but when she starts giving him mixed signals (first, trying to get a date, then, letting the competition – Edie – get to him instead), this becomes frustrating. Not just for Mike, but also for me.
I also don’t get Lynette (Felicity Huffman) – a full-time mom who cannot get a grip on her out of control kids. And yet, her background is a VP of a big, successful corporation. She even admits in one monologue “I could manage 80 or so people in my company, why can’t I control my 4 kids?” Yes, Lynette, why can’t you? My small male brain just doesn’t understand that concept – you can come to terms with adult, competitive, conniving people at your (previous) career, but now that you spend entire day with the kids, you cannot manage them? What kind of manager were you anyway, and what kind of message does this send to the audience – is it a warning against having children, or a comment about management skills in today’s corporate America? Not funny, not observational, and not realistic.
Bree and her entire family are just a powder keg waiting to explode. I’m surprised how her husband or any of her children didn’t just kill her in her sleep. Again, an obsessive-compulsive control freak (that’s how she was introduced at first), is turned into a caricature of a concept, completely unbelievable, and unreasonable. Bree is no longer funny, because not only she is capable of driving her husband away, she’s alienated both kids, and it’s only been 4 episodes. Everything in Bree’s household is tense, and unpleasant, yet she hasn’t changed one bit.
I do get the relationship b/w Susan, and Mrs. Huber. It’s real, it’s funny, and it does provide commentary on “nosy neighbors”. I also get the relationship b/w Gabrielle (the trophy wife), and Carlos. She cheats on him (with John) out of sheer boredom, but he’s unable to give her attention she needs, so occasionally he simply buys her a big, expensive present. Plus, he’s getting suspicious of her infidelity. That plot line is actually tragic, but the show does manage to make it funny. And, mainly it’s due to Carlos and John.
In fact, I find the men in the show to be more interesting than women. I WANT to know what Mike’s agenda is, and why he’s taking his time picking between Edie and Susan. I WANT to know how Rex is going to stand up to Bree, if at all, and I REALLY WONDER about John’s motives (Gabrielle’s gardener), who knows he’s being used sexually by a bored housewife, but goes along anyway.
Seems to me that all these characters were created rounded and realistic, and over the 4 episodes, the women (because of their screen time) have used up their “personality”, and have been reduced to cardboard cutouts, and men (since we only see them for a brief time) are still functioning within their well-developed personas. If I was surrounded by caricatures, I would become more interested in “real” people that exist around me, and so far, the men seem more real, and more believable than the women.
Perhaps that’s the point of the show – but why such emphasis on women, and why this title? Totally inappropriate. The show can be much more interesting (there’s enough characters and plot lines to full up at least two seasons), but I cannot bear another Sunday night of Bree’s compulsions, or Susan’s childish “likes me – likes me not” games. Get better writers, or go back to the drawing board. This show is all about characters, and yours are melting away week after week. And more of Mrs. Hubert – she’s dead-on. I know I’m over-analyzing this little show, but it was introduced as so much more, and it’s already wasted so many opportunities, that I cannot help it.
Catch this once-funny show on Sunday nights, at 8pm, on ABC network.
