The first season of Desperate Housewives is an absolute masterpiece of television.
In an era that we regularly look back upon for shows like The Sopranos (also fantastic) with admiration, this murder mystery stands apart as a tight and clean twenty-three episodes of network television. It was slick, it was funny, and it was female led. Not just women, but (gasp) women in -or approaching- middle-age.
I cannot emphasise that enough. While it was not the only show with actresses above the title that debuted that year (hello Veronica Mars, go home) it was distinct in that many of these women were meant to be pushing forty. They were the mothers of teenagers, widows, divorcees, and varied in experience and ambition.
The core five, as the show began, were a group of neighbours and sometimes friends who played poker together, a consistently emphasised piece of connective tissue. They were:
Gabrielle Solis
The youngest of the group and the only one who begins the show still in her twenties, Gaby is the trophy wife to a corrupt businessman named Carlos. Stuck in hell (suburbia), she’s spending her time spending money and fucking sleeping with committing statutory rape with her gardener. You could describe her as shallow, and she is, but there’s depth beneath that perfectly styled hair and fashionable-for-2004 outfit.
Susan Mayer
A semi-recently divorced single mother and artist, living of alimony, romanticism and a barely simmering sense of spite. She’s a klutz, but rarely vindictive or cruel (except when she is). Her biggest feat in the first season is burning down her neighbour and romantic rival’s house down by accident.
Edie Britt
Susan’s romantic rival and the street’s resident floozy. It’s not a dig, she’d be ecstatic with the title. Her main goal in the first season is to sleep with her new neighbour Mike, who’s interested in both her and Susan. She’s the one who’s house burns down. Don’t worry, she gets her back by burning down Susan’s house later.
Lynette Scarvo
Painful motherhood personified. It’s not that her children are awful (they are), it’s that this former career gal cannot stop getting pregnant. Evil twins on the first, accidental go. A third son with just as much energy. A daughter next. There’s high strung, and then there’s four children under ten when you never wanted them. Another pregnancy later too. Good god! Her husband is a “goofball” (edit: asshole).
Bree Van de Kamp
Perfection is crystallised in Bree. A Stepford wife when we first meet her, she’s an old money type of scary, with opinions on how a good family is meant to look. Unfortunately for her, she has a gay son, a thot daughter, and a limp dick husband, Rex. Tragic.
This is the ragtag group of detectives who spend a full season attempting to unravel the unfortunate suicide of Mary Alice, their neighbour and narrator. All the while, each sorting through their personal issues, including divorce, romance, and taxes. It’s extremely watchable.
But there’s a catch, and one plenty of other shows of a similar format face. Once the mystery of your show has been solved, you need to replace it with a new one. Unfortunately, that’s usually a trap. Either you wind up escalating to ridiculous heights (see Riverdale), deescalate and pray you’ve managed to hold the audience with your cast of characters (see Riverdale), or switch to a new format to escape the trap only to lose the original quality of the show (see Riverdale).
Desperate Housewives escalated into a brick wall.
I cannot emphasise enough how quickly this show got ridiculous. Or how much I loved it. While the second season attempted to maintain a coherent through-line with a new neighbour bringing her own drama (a disabled son who took the fall for his homicidal footballer brother and thus lives in the basement), by the third season, we have an evil faux-Kennedy political plot, a psychopathic middle schooler who has to be sent away, and a fake pregnancy to hide a teen one. And this is all before the plane crash, crazed eco-terrorist, and tornado.
This isn’t to say the show was awful by this point. In fact, the second season is home to one of the strongest scenes in the series, with Gaby being forced to reckon with her grief after miscarrying the child she never wanted. She then loses two more chances at motherhood, one to an mistake with surrogacy, and one with her adopted child being taken back by the birth parents. The second scene is arguably Eva Longoria’s best acting in her entire career.
But even with moments of greatness, something had to give. After one more season of attempts at escalation (oh no, Bree has a rival homemaker with a fake daughter!) it all came crashing down with…a time jump. Yep, a fucking time jump.
It actually worked.
Kind of.
There’s obviously some jumping of the shark from season five onwards. And when the “grounded” version of your show involved an homage to The Good Son (1993), that’s a whole lot of cheese coming your way. But without the necessity of having to show the journey, we were able to get the characters to an entirely new destination and work from there.
Except within a season or so, everyone was back to the status quo. Yes, there was mileage to be had from a blind Carlos Solis, but ultimately, the show didn’t know how to handle big changes for a very long time. Carlos is blind for the equivalent of a season (a chunk of episodes either side of the time jump), thinks about giving up wealth to be a masseuse for a while, and that’s that. By the end of season five, he’s back to being rich and distant. They just have children now. Annoying children.
Bree Mason-Van de Kamp-Hodge-Weston is probably the character who most suffers in the last few seasons. Actually, there is no probably about it, the writers just fundamentally just don’t understand her. This isn’t Marcia Cross’ fault, the woman is a saint for dealing with an increasingly chaotic set of circumstances. Her performance is never anything less than stellar. But by the second half, it’s like the show is bored and trying anything. She’s an alcoholic, the town tramp for a brief period, a famous chef, and in the end, just quite boring and successful. These flashes of interest may involve great acting and even a few strong monologues, but they’re still flashes. Rarely does anything matter, unless a character is being written out.
Because that’s the pattern. Interesting ideas that cannot be explored for longer than 10 episodes at the most. A reset is needed because the dynamics established don’t work outside of these rigid structures. Susan cannot be more than a perpetual romantic, Lynette cannot be more than frazzled and distraught, Gaby cannot be more than money hungry (ambitious if you’re kind - the show rarely is) and Bree…Bree has a kitchen.
The worst of the show comes in the form of flashbacks. Some, like Lynette’s and Susan’s, inspire little more than apathy. But when we see Bree and her first husband interacting, it’s startling. Because by the time the show was wrapping up, they’ve “evolved” the characters so much that they seemingly cannot write them as they were. In season one, Bree is cold and awkward. Terminally polite. She’s obsessed with perfection, and rarely vulnerable. Her husband is a dolt, but he’s emotionally open and ready to at least talk. But the Rex of the flashback is cruel and dismissive.
It's all there to justify the pointless backstory of her mother, but in that moment, the show proves it not only fails to understand where it is, but where it was. Bree looks different from the first season. Not in the way of aging, but in styling and presence. Cross spends the first season of the show with a sleek and matronly appearance, but in this flashback, she looks…too pretty. Her hair has volume, her makeup is soft, her eyes are wide. There’s essentially no effort to conform to the original styling or performance, maybe because they didn’t even notice.
And that is how a show atrophies. Time passes, people become complacent, and it only ends when the money runs out. By 2012, the show had been on for almost a decade, was essentially stagnate. They replaced Edie with Renee (Vanessa Williams, slumming it), trying to capture the former magic. But there was nothing. With no renewal, they wrote a fairytale happy ending, let the women go off to all be go-getters in an almost condescending finale, and everyone walked away…happy(?).
I think what strikes me about Desperate Housewives in retrospect is how quickly the quality dropped. It went from a show with soap elements to a soap opera. I’ve already referenced Riverdale, but for all that show’s faults, the escalation arguably made it stronger. “Camp”, as the Twitter intellectuals yell about Karlie Kloss. Ridiculousness and frivolity allowed the more fun aspects of the show to thrive. But Desperate Housewives, for whatever reason, couldn’t do that.
Maybe it’s just the result of the era. The circumstances of being a network darling must have been an enormous pressure. Screenwriting is hard and having to work around five (later four) large personalities can only make it more difficult. But there’s just something about the collapse here that fascinates and frustrates me. Maybe it’s just nostalgia, but that first season suggested such a strong start to something that ended so disappointingly.
Whatever, I’ll always go to bat for the first season.
.