Desperate Love

Desperate Housewives is the worst show on TV. The characters are petulant and Botoxed to high heaven, the plot lines are preposterous, the dialogue is weak, and the acting is, well, desperate. Now let me clear the decks and tell you the truth. I'm a bottom-feeder and I love this god-awful soap with all my heart. Undoubtedly, you, dear reader, are scratching your head wondering how the hell you've wandered into the clutches of a writer with such poor taste. You put your coffee cup down and bang your head against the table, rattling the floor beneath. You cringe, you writhe.You simply don't understand.
And you know what, reader? I don't get it myself. I surreptitiously pull up Safari and salivate at the thought of spending an hour with Eva Longoria, Felicity Huffman, Teri Hatcher, and Marcia Cross via hulu.com. I probably sound like a lesbian but I'm not, I can promise you that. My love is chaste though these women are objectively fiiine for all of their middle age.

If you've never tuned in, let me break the characters down. Longoria plays Gabrielle Solis—a smokin' hot Hispanic with a penchant for retail therapy, shaming her family, and swishing her pony tail. Next up is Huffman. She plays Lynette Scavo—obnoxiously moral mother of five (or is it more?) with an idiot husband and loads of laundry to do and dishes to wash, always bemoaning the loss of a nonexistent career while flexing yoga-toned arms. Then there's Teri Hatcher, who plays Susan Delfino. Delfino is a shit-show with a heart of gold. She tries to “do the right thing” but burns down a neighbor's home, acts in yuppie-porn, shamelessly seduces an ex-con turned plumber, and just generally runs around like a chicken with her head cut off. Finally, Marcia Cross plays Bree Van de Kamp—a severely uptight woman with stifled sexual urges and a tendency towards manic baking (pastry and not marijuana).

The four live on Wisteria Lane—a manicured street that hums pleasantly with quiet scandal as the flowers inevitably twist over and under the homes. Wisteria Lane is home to the elderly, the gay, the Puerto Rican, the young, the rich, the Black, the middle-class, the once jailed, the once troubled, and the like. This veritable melange of people and circumstances seems highly improbable. On a fundamental level, how are the lavish and the destitute paying the same mortgage? How are ex-cons living next door to beauty queens and manic bakers? Wisteria Lane pushes the borders of reality until we're taken to a perverse and psychotic suburbia. The shenanigans are never-ending and the plot lines move forward, unconcerned with coherent narrative.
In the first season of Desperate Housewives, eternal narrator and distinguished housewife Mary Alice Young commits suicide and shocks the neighborhood. Mary Alice kills herself for fear of a black secret involving her husband and son coming to light. At her wake, Gabrielle, Lynette, Susan, and Bree meet and greet over cucumber sandwiches and noodle casserole, perturbed by their mutual friend's demise.

In the following seasons, I was both disgusted and delighted by the meandering story lines of the housewives. Gabrielle would seduce the beefy, if overly sensitive, high school gardener before finding that her daughter had been switched at birth; Lynette would give birth to a nation of a children before realizing that her husband had once cheated with the black diva next door; Susan would tryst with her ex-husband, marry her beloved ex-con, give birth to a child, star in domestic porn and burn down her enemy's house; and Bree would get divorced, own up to her alcoholism, seduce her AA life coach, seduce a young repair man, cope with her children's raging hatred, and bake pastry after pastry.

I'm seven seasons in and at no point were these story lines believable, and at no point was I bored.

In the show's opening credits, tinny carnival music plays as an apple falls from the tree—a callback to Eve's sinful foray into the forbidden fruit. I wish I could say that I had the willpower, the absolute lack of hunger, to close my lap top and forget the whole sinful charade once and for all. But somewhere in there, I too was seduced, and now I wait with bated breath and infernal hunger. I wait for my computer to load, and for these stupid women to appear like the snake in the mist, offering evil wisdom and glistening, red delight.