In one memorable scene, Lynette, who is overwhelmed by her children and coming down hard from the ADD medication she’s been stealing from them, suddenly sees her dead friend bathed in a halo of white light. While Bree, Gabrielle, Lynette and Susan are shocked and confused by her death, they all understand her desperation more than they let on. Season one begins with the death of Mary Alice Young who, despite her “perfect life”, felt compelled to blow her brains out with a pistol one pleasant afternoon. Beneath its fairy floss exterior, Desperate Housewives explores the deep sadness, thwarted hopes and simmering rage that often afflicts women confined to the domestic sphere. The show’s success proved that a fantastical spin on the lives of housewives – albeit unreasonably hot ones – was meaty and compelling enough to sustain a primetime audience’s attention. Yet, it’s the show’s highly stylised theatricality – its “soapy” elements – that both drew me to it as a teenager and make it so enduringly fun nearly two decades on. To the contrary, Desperate Housewives is superbly acted, slickly produced and packed with delightfully acerbic lines. Was it a drama, mystery, comedy or merely a trashy soap? Speaking to Vanity Fair in 2005, Hatcher and James Denton, who plays Susan’s partner Mike, rejected the soap opera label, for its association with “bad lighting, bad writing, bad acting”. While Desperate Housewives immediately drew large audiences, critics were unsure how to categorise it. Cherry was inspired to create the show after watching a news report on Andrea Yates, a Texan housewife who drowned her five kids in a bathtub while suffering from postpartum psychosis. They’re also financially dependent on their husbands, so are forced to exert power in subversive and sometimes downright violent ways. Her neighbours Bree Van de Kamp (Marcia Cross), Gabrielle Solis (Eva Longoria) and Lynette Scavo (Felicity Huffman) are homemakers. Susan Mayer (Teri Hatcher) is a single mum with the fittingly quaint profession of children’s book illustrator. But where Carrie and her BFFs live a “you go girl” life of cosmopolitans and Manolos, Marc Cherry’s Desperate Housewives inhabit the decidedly darker universe of Wisteria Lane. As the Sex and the City finale aired in 2004, another television fantasy of female friendship dreamed up by a gay man was just beginning.
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