Download Desperate Housewives
Season Four
No wonder people have called “Desperate Housewives” “Sex and the Suburbs.” Like HBO’s once-popular “Sex and the City,” this sexually tamer but equally smart ABC show features a group of female friends who experience life at its quirkiest and frequently get together to talk about their feelings and frustrations. One of their circle–make that a former member–even provides a Carrie Bradshaw-style voiceover and tries to put things into philosophizing perspective.
But this darling of a debut series begs comparison to more than a single show. Besides the female bonding and sexual shenanigans, there’s also plenty of “Sopranos”-style family intrigue, mischief, mayhem, and even murder. Creator Marc Cherry (”The Golden Girls”) revived his career and created an international television phenomenon (it’s seen in more than 100 countries) by combining three genres: soap opera, mystery, and situation comedy, and a terrific ensemble cast manages to pull off this genre juggling act with plenty of zest and flair.
Teri Hatcher oozes believability as Susan, a children’s book illustrator who, like most of the women of Wisteria Lane, doesn’t really work all that much. She’s a neurotic ex-divorcee with a level-headed daughter (Andrea Bowen) and a husband named Mike (James Denton), a neighborhood plumber hooked on pain pills. Susan is desperate to try to help him. Then there’s Bree Van De Camp (Marcia Cross), the Martha Stewart clone whose veneer of perfection has been scratched and punctured so many times that it would cause a lesser woman to cave in. But not Bree, who will resort to breaking-and-entering to steal a newcomer’s recipe to stay on top. Her husband, Orson (Kyle MacLachlan), has always seemed a little weird, even for a dentist, and he’s got a secret of his own involving poor Mike. But together, their ruse is that Bree is pregnant. The plan? Bree’s daughter (Joy Lauren), who’s really pregnant, is locked away in a convent until the day the baby pops out and Bree and Orson can walk the suburban streets with parental pride. Of course, not everything will go according to plan. It doesn’t get more desperate than that.
Well, I stand corrected. When feisty little housewife Gabrielle Solis (Eva Longoria Parker) discovers that Victor Lang (John Slattery), the town mayor she just married, isn’t the man for her after all, things get so desperate that the police take an interest. But it’s all so complicated, because the man she’s having an affair with is her former husband Carlos (Ricardo Chavira), who in turn is being emotionally blackmailed by their former friend Edie (Nicollette Sheridan).
Then there’s Lynette Scavo (Felicity Huffman), who has to endure visits not only from her husband’s “love child” but the kid’s mom as well. But that pales compared to the cancer she’s fighting and trying to hide from her friends, while her husband Tom (Doug Savant) tries to pick up the slack by riding herd on their misbehaving kids.
New to the neighborhood is a gay couple (Tuc Watkins and Kevin Rahm) who shake things up with, of all things, a fountain, and a woman who returns to the house where she had lived with a previous spouse. And Katherine Mayfair (Dana Delaney) and her gyno husband and daughter (Nathan Fillion, Lyndsy Fonseca) shake things up the most, if you count just how many individual lives they vex and confound.
This is the year of hospitals, and the year a tornado comes to Wisteria Lane. Oddly enough, that storm episode Cherry & Co. seem most proud of is the one that I felt seemed the weakest. Maybe it’s because I once outran a tornado on the interstate or because we get tornado watches and warnings all the time in the Midwest, so that you really only do something when the sirens sound. The details we get in this show–going to the store and stocking provisions, taping window glass, watching the weather-service to track the storm as it comes closer, and even the high winds that whirl for a LONG time before the funnel even appears–feel a lot closer to what we experienced in the Caribbean when a tropical storm or hurricane approached. But that’s a nit-picky criticism.
People who loved Season One will rejoice that the show is most certainly on-track this fourth season. The writing is smart, there are tons of cliffhangers, and we continue to care about the characters–even minor ones like old Mrs. McCluskey (Kathryn Joosten). It’s the small touches, though, that make this show the success it’s become. Our sense of what we know is constantly being challenged. Just about the time we think we’re learning something or figuring out one of the many teaser secrets and mysteries that swirl around, something happens to undercut that. Example? New housewife Katherine and her husband have a secret they allude to, something that happened in Chicago. But there’s also a question over why they moved back, why she won’t let her daughter in the room that was formerly hers, and why her daughter doesn’t remember anything. First we think it’s one thing, but then just about the time you start to think more favorably toward Katherine, you see that she’s been lying or faking it again.
Susan’s more serious story line (which I won’t spoil here) strips her of her silly pratfalls but you still feel like you’re watching Susan. And I think that holds true for all the characters. This reset of the timeline propels them forward but does not totally forget their past or make them into completely new characters.
