A couple of months ago, Eva Longoria told the Observer that, after 20 years, people are still discovering Desperate Housewives, the show that made her an overnight star when it first arrived in 2004. The campy, suburban melodrama-mystery was a pop culture phenomenon in its day. It’s hard to overstate just how huge it was, though the fact that it still comes up in every interview with anyone who played a part in it should give some indication. Only recently, its lingering influence has revealed itself in Agatha All Along, in an episode that owes a visual debt to Wisteria Lane, and with a nod in Only Murders in the Building, in which Longoria is guest-starring as a version of herself.
Desperate Housewives wrapped for good in 2012, after eight seasons and more behind-the-scenes drama than it had character deaths – and it had a whopping 57 of those. (Its Vanity Fair cover shoot, and the pointed interview with the cast and creators, remains an all-time classic of the genre.) In the years since it departed, it has found a new audience through streaming, but to go back to the start and watch it again for the first time since it ended is to catapult oneself back to an entirely different era.
Created by Marc Cherry, who had been a writer and producer on The Golden Girls, it follows the lives of four wealthy women who live on Wisteria Lane in the fictional town of Fairview, Eagle State. Much like Sex and the City, which had ended at the beginning of 2004, each of its leads represented a “type” of woman, as imagined by a gay man. Lynette (Felicity Huffman) is the frazzled working mother; Susan (Teri Hatcher) the ditsy romantic; the uptight Bree (Marcia Cross) is the “mayor of Stepford”, according to one of the street’s many miserable children; and Gabrielle (Longoria) is a trophy wife, a former model who has married a rich businessman, who keeps his dissatisfied spouse in a big house and adorns her with fine jewellery.
Desperate Housewives’ sense of humour fixes it firmly to the pinboard of the early 00s. It is jauntily satirical, and unselfconsciously outrageous, in a way that simply would not exist in the current age of discourse. I had somehow forgotten that the whole thing opens with Mary Alice (Brenda Strong) repainting a lawn chair then shooting herself in the head, for reasons so fantastically absurd that it is worth marvelling at how they thought they would get away with it. But it sustained its devotion to excess for 180 episodes, and excess was, mostly, the point. The episodes boomerang between farce and high drama, between tragedy, pratfalls and comic nudity. “It’s like my grandmother always said: an erect penis doesn’t have a conscience,” says Gabrielle, early on, to give a taste of its many bon mots.
It is easy to see the problems with it retrospectively, just as Friends, for example, is regularly pulled up for jokes that wouldn’t pass muster today. I had also forgotten just how young Gabrielle’s gardener and secret lover John is supposed to be: at one point she tries to call him, only for him to let her know that he’s in algebra class. Gabrielle’s husband, meanwhile, tells her that if one of his colleagues wants to grope her, she’d better let it happen. Watch it alongside those documentaries about the terrible tabloid culture of the 00s, and you feel more empathy for women in the public eye, and women in general. It jokes that Mary Alice told everyone she was a size 6, but on going through her clothes after her death, the women learn that she was an 8. Talk about secrets! Neighbour Edie (Nicollette Sheridan, who attempted to sue the show after her character was killed off, saying it was retaliation for her making a complaint about Cherry) was the Samantha-esque maneater who competes with her neighbours for new conquests. “Susan had met the enemy, and she was a slut,” narrates Mary Alice, still judgmental even from the afterlife.
But for all of its “I can’t believe they went there” moments (and there are many of those), it has a lightness of touch. It meanders, it backs itself into narrative cul de sacs and at times it flails around as if the lights have been switched off, but it has the feel of a frothy pleasure. The obvious heir to its legacy is the Real Housewives franchise, which began in 2006 in Orange County, and turned rich-woman ennui into a reality behemoth. If the dramatic fictions of Wisteria Lane once seemed excessive, then it could barely compete once the so-called “real” lives of the women of Beverly Hills, New York City, Atlanta, etc had arrived.
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Its influence can also be seen in more prestigious television, too, starting with Big Little Lies, but making its way into most of what I think of as the entire late-Nicole Kidman genre, in which the secrets of wealthy suburbia are spilled over expensive marble kitchen counters and goblets of wine. The key difference is that once, the Desperate Housewives could be ridiculous, clumsy and entirely over the top. Now, when it comes to drama, we take it all very seriously indeed.
