What's up with these housewives?
Posted on Thu, Oct. 28, 2004
Ellen Gray
Here's what's behind the popularity of 'Desperate'
DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES. 9 p.m. Sunday, Channel 6.
WHAT DO WOMEN really want?
I don't know why people keep turning to TV shows created by men
to answer that, but after four weeks on the air, ABC's "Desperate
Housewives" already finds itself at the intersection of pop
culture and pop psychology, smack in the middle of the same public
square where "Ally McBeal" and "Sex and the City"
were both praised and pilloried a few years back.
It doesn't help that "Desperate," with 21 million viewers a
week on Sundays - and another 7 million for its Saturday reruns - is a
much bigger hit than either of those shows ever were: It just means
that even more people will be weighing in on a show whose campy humor
and even campier drama probably aren't up to the load.
Among the unamused: Susan Reimer, a family columnist for the Baltimore
Sun, who recently called the show, which follows the adventures and
misadventures of women living on the same suburban street, "ABC's
newest reason for Muslims to hate us."
But who needs Muslims when we have the American Family Association,
currently crowing about its successful blackmail of former "Desperate
Housewives" advertisers Tyson Foods, ConAgra and Kellogg's?
Not that I think kids should be watching "Desperate Housewives,"
which so far has dealt, however cartoonishly, with suicide, adultery and
some characters' ambivalence about their own children.
Still, I continue to wait for more of these groups to target, say,
"CSI," whose tendency to link sex with death makes it no
more wholesome viewing for the pre-teen set, who seem to watch it in
alarming numbers.
Even those who don't shake their heads may be taking creator Marc
Cherry's little soap opera too seriously. Time magazine TV critic
James Poniewozik, for instance, recently wrote that "ABC's
dark-humored soap suggests that all is not well on Venus in 2004 -
and that you underappreciate women at your peril, in TV and in life."
Well, sure. But you couldn't have gotten that from watching
"Everybody Loves Raymond"?
Or even from talking to actual women?
A certain amount of media piling on is to be expected with the advent
of any hit show, and "Desperate Housewives" offers far more
opportunities for cross-promotion than the season's other original new
hit, "Lost," there being only so much social commentary one
can impose on a series about a tropical island inhabited by plane-crash
survivors, wild boars and polar bears.
Which is probably why the Cleveland Plain Dealer is asking its women
readers to write in with their answers to the question: "How
desperate are you?" and offering spa treatments, free dinners
and (arrrgggh) cooking classes in return.
The funny thing about all this is that "Desperate Housewives,"
in its own comic way, does have something to say about what women want,
if only about what it is a lot of us seem to want to see on television.
My own theory - and you just knew I had one, right? - is that what
"Ally McBeal," "Sex and the City" and "Desperate
Housewives" have in common is that they've shown us women who somehow
found time in their busy lives to spend with other women.
Even if a lot of the time's wasted talking about men.
"Desperate Housewives" may be taking heat for those scenes
in which Gabrielle (Eva Longoria), one of the women of Wisteria Lane,
takes her yard boy to bed, but how many of its female viewers actually
fantasize about sex with a teenager?
Not many, I'm guessing, given the percentage of them who probably are
raising boys of their own (and who probably looked at the sock the
yard boy left under his lover's bed last week and knew - ewww - exactly
what it would have smelled like).
No, the fantasy is that women who don't work outside the home have time
to hang around one another's kitchen tables, playing cards or just
dishing neighborhood gossip.
Like Ally McBeal's paucity of billable hours and Carrie Bradshaw's
apparently flexible deadlines, this is a TV Land invention that doesn't
even jibe with what we know about the characters.
Sure, Felicity Huffman's Lynette has three of her four kids in school
all day, but have you noticed that the baby seems to come and go, too?
Shouldn't Teri Hatcher's Susan, a single mom and an illustrator who
works from home, be spending a bit more time at the drawing board?
And as Martha Stewart could tell you, being an obsessive-compulsive
homemaker like Marcia Cross' Bree Van De Camp doesn't leave much time
for coffee breaks.
But for any woman who's ever spent several weeks trying to schedule
lunch with a once-close friend or who's found her extra-family
relationships increasingly limited to e-mail and the odd Instant
Messenger exchange, these female bonding sessions involving people
who don't share the same workplace really are seductive, and far
more compelling than most sexual daydreams.
In other words, it's not the sex, stupid.
It's the sisterhood.
© Philadelphia Daily News 2004. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.philly.com/mld/dailynews/living/10033832.htm