To date, Housewives is still the longest-running primetime television show that features an all-female cast, with Charmed and Pretty Little Liars coming in at number two and number three, and it didn’t survive eight whole seasons without a tiff (or two or three or four) between the show’s leads. ( Reading ‘Desperate Housewives’: Beyond the White Picket Fence, edited by Janet McCabe, may or may not have been used by the author as a reference while writing her undergraduate thesis.) There were dolls, there were games (there are still games-as of writing, Desperate Housewives: The Game is still available for download on the App Store), there were coffee table books, there were scholarly works. It became a regular at the Emmys, the Golden Globes, and the Screen Actors Guild Awards, winning 71 out of 273 nominations across various award shows, including GLAAD and NAACP (although one could argue that its queer and POC representation leaves much to be desired). By 2006, Desperate Housewives was a pop culture staple. Disparate, yet somehow making complete sense. Cherry had initially compared it to American Beauty, and critics affirmed this in various news sites, continuing to compare it to four completely disparate pieces of media- Knots Landing, The Golden Girls, Sex and the City, and Twin Peaks. 21.3 million viewers tuned in, and critics could not get enough of it. Marc Cherry’s soapy, campy opus, inspired by the trial of Andrea Yates, the Texan mother who confessed to drowning all five of her children in a bathtub in 2001, was ABC’s biggest success in 2004 and beyond. There was no lack of bewildering and baffling storylines in Desperate Housewives’ eight-year run, but amidst the campiness and extravagance of every episode-all of which were named for a Sondheim song or lyric-hid genuine, tender moments between its four main characters, Gaby Solis, Susan Mayer, Bree Van de Kamp, and Lynette Scavo. And a million other things too: fingers getting chopped off, ashes getting thrown in one’s face, a tornado, a plane crash, a sex offender next door. Housewives had it all: a model having a steamy affair with a young gardener, a harried mother taking her sons’ ADHD medication to keep up with the demands of parenting, a Republican housewife having to deal with the fact that her son is gay, and the girl-next-door falling head-over-heels- literally-for her hot plumber neighbor. Of course, that was the last time that street would ever be quiet. It was a pilot like no other-daytime soapiness disturbing the prestige of primetime television with Mary Alice’s death, the suicide that launched a thousand unravelling secrets in the quiet neighborhood of Wisteria Lane. ![]() This week, 15 years ago, Desperate Housewives aired.
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