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Female Intuition – ABC’s DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES

By Chris Ryall

July 22, 2004

Let me say right up front, ABC’s DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES will be anointed a “chick show” pretty much every time it’s written about. If you’re a guy, you’ll end up feeling emasculated if you even profess interest in watching this, and will get mocked by your friends if you do watch it. So if you’re not the type to stand up to your friends or co-workers’ opinions, then, well, you’re going to miss out on a pretty decent show. The LOVELY BONES-like premise shouldn’t deter anyone from checking it out. See, the show opens on Mary Alice Young (Sheryl Lee, who’s making a career out of roles like this, as you’ll read in a moment. Of course, at press time, word is that Lee's part has been recast and reshot), a perfectly suburban housewife in a perfectly suburban neighborhood. In fact, the neighborhood is so perfect, it looks suspiciously like a studio backlot street (one I’ve driven down numerous times, which made for a minor distraction every time they showed it). Mary Alice, who serves as our narrator, looks perfectly content. She does her chores around the house, picks up dry cleaning, bakes. She then takes a small pistol out of a drawer and blows her head off.

The neighborhood busybody hears the noise and goes to the house under the guise of returning Mary Alice’s Brother P-Touch-labeled blender back to her. She sees the body, calls the police and then, ever the nasty opportunist like any good TV busybody, she peels the label off the blender and keeps it for herself.

It’s at the funeral reception for Mary Alice that her now-deceased ghost starts introducing us to the neighbors on Mysteria Lane. Mary Alice was part of a little koffee klatch of friends, kind of a sample of what the SEX AND THE CITY women would’ve become. None of them have it easy. We meet her friends Lynette Scalvo (the always good Felicity Huffman), a mother of four young boys whose husband is always gone on business trips, leaving her with these four unruly monsters. Lynette makes parenting look a step below hauling coal from a West Virginia mine. She used to have a thriving advertising career but when she got knocked up, her husband talked her into quitting and staying home with the kids.

Next is trophy wife and former runway model Gabrielle Solis (Eva Longoria), currently in the middle of a loveless marriage with a rich businessman who neglects her (although, as we later see, she attempts to fill that void, or get back at him, through occasional trysts with their cracker-ass gardener).

MELROSE PLACE’s Marcia Cross plays another friend, Bree Van De Kamp, a woman who tries way too hard to make sure there’s not one hair out of place in her entire life. She dresses up, cooks gourmet meals (to the chagrin of her kids who just want, like, navy bean soup), smiles pleasantly no matter what she’s thinking. They didn’t show it, of course, but I’m also pretty sure she still has the MELROSE PLACE head wound scar, because she seems just as crazy here as she did there, just in a less lethal way. So far.

Finally, Susan Mayer (Teri Hatcher, mercifully free from Clark kent and Howie Long) is the mother of a GILMORE GIRLS-like teen daughter. She’s recently split from her cheatin’ louse of a husband. She also evidently makes the worst macaroni and cheese on the planet.

As Susan sets her platter of mac-n-cheese down at the wake, she reminisces to a lunch with all the friends, including Mary Alice. They talk about how her husband told her that all husbands lead lives of quiet desperation. What do women lead, she ponders.

Back in present-day, the friends all ponder why Mary Alice would’ve capped herself. They can’t believe she wasn’t happy, and think that if she had something big on her mind, they would’ve known. Which of course means she had something big on her mind.

Susan meets Mike Defino, a handsome single plumber who just moved into the neighborhood. They bond over her bad cooking, and look a bit longingly at each other across the room. This fact isn’t lost on Susan’s daughter, who does some checking and finds out that he is indeed single. She tells Susan that her dad and his new girlfriend laughed about the fact that Susan hasn’t gone on a date since they split, so she gets fired up and goes over to Mike’s house to welcome him to the neighborhood. Of course, so does the Kim Cattrall-like predatory divorcee, Edie Britt (Nicolette Sheridan). Meanwhile, the problems for everyone continue. Bree’s kids accuse of her trying to be the “mayor of Stepford,” making me wonder if this was a clever reference to the old movie or a blatant plug for the new one. Eventually, her husband says he wants a divorce, that he can’t live in this detergent commercial any longer. She refuses to acknowledge this and goes on with her business of keeping up appearances.

Lynette’s demon-spawn kids are getting worse, but luckily the absent husband finally comes home, for one night, anyway, bearing gifts for the kids and unwanted sex for her (she’s too tired fro child-rearing, see).

Meanwhile, the deceased woman Mary Alice’s husband, who already looked a bit creepy and suspicious before, gets caught by his son digging into the swimming pool bottom with a pickaxe. “The sound of a family secret,” Mary Alice’s ghost intones.

Susan is led to believe that the neighborhood slut Edie is nailing a guy one night, and she assumes it’s Mike the plumber, a guy she’s decided she wants. It’s only after she accidentally burns Edie’s house down that we see it wasn’t Mike. Of course, after that, away from her, we see that there’s much more to Mike than there seems (seems to be the case with everyone on Mysteria Lane).

At the end, the group helps pack up Mary Alice’s clothes, since the husband said it’s too painful for him. They find an ominous letter sent to Mary Alice. It reads “I know what you did. It makes me sick. I’m going to tell.” And it’s post-marked the day she killed herself (which doesn’t entirely make sense but the point is clear—she probably killed herself over this mysterious missive).

All I ask from pilot episodes is interesting characters, an interesting premise and maybe a little mystery, or at least reason to tune back in. If everything is spelled out for us in Week One, where’s the impetus to come back for more? This show has a bit of all those things. Like I say, the fact that guys thus far are uniformly bad isn’t exactly my favorite part of the show. If that's to be the case, then the show should go a little further and embrace this, playing up the camp factor a bit more. It's all pretty straightforward right now. Still, Teri Hatcher’s Susan is cute in her attempts to get back dating again and in the way she and her daughter get along. Like I say, this mother/teen daughter thing is done more effectively on GILMORE GIRLS, but it was watchable here, too. And Marcia Cross obviously has some reasons for her extreme Martha Stewart makeover. There are enough questions or hanging elements in this show to intrigue me to see where it goes from here. Eventually, once we get to bottom of her suicide, I hope that Sheryl Lee’s narrator can take off. Nothing worse than an omniscient ghost that overstays her welcome.

But if this is the level of “chick shows” coming for the Fall season, well, I’ll probably get more in touch with my feminine side and keep watching (or at least TiVoing, since it’s on in a rough time slot). ABC is easily leading the other networks as far as interesting Fall TV shows go.

ABC’s DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES airs this Fall on Sunday nights at 9 PM.

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