RON TOM/© 2004 ABC, INC. - In the show’s eighth and final season, some of the players have changed, but the core remains the same.
In an era of constant online sharing, filled with cheerful Facebook updates and lovely Instagram photos, we can skillfully edit the image of ourselves we choose to project the outside world — though we know it’s not entirely real.
Because everyone has secrets. Everyone has moments of gripping loneliness and fear and sadness and panic and that one thing, if not many things, in their life that induces that feeling of pure, unadulterated desperation.
And eight years ago, the aptly named “Desperate Housewives,” set in a fictional, idyllic suburban world that masked the characters’ true pain, sharply captured that timeless internal struggle in a way that truly resonated with the audience.
But this is also an era of swiftly canceled shows — so what was it that made the ABC series stick through all these years? During nearly a decade of character ups and downs, falling ratings, and some truly absurd storylines, one thing stayed consistent:“Desperate Housewives” showed us that it’s okay to be a mess.
Sunday night, the soap-tastic dramedy bids farewell for good with a mediocre amount of fanfare for a show that, eight seasons ago, truly started out with a bang.
More specifically, it was a gunshot — a self-inflicted bullet that killed a housewife on Wisteria Lane in the first scene of the pilot back in October 2004. It was a gunshot meticulously planned by a sweet, friendly woman named Mary Alice Young (Brenda Strong), and it happened only after she had served her family waffles for breakfast, done a load of laundry and picked up the dry cleaning.
A grim catalyst for the show, but one that captured millions of people wanting to know the answer to the same question as the characters: Why did a woman with a seemingly perfect life want to die? Soon, it evolved into something more than a mystery. It forced the characters to take a closer look at their own lives, and reevaluate the cost of keeping an image of perfection vs. facing the truth about their troubles — a tantalizing idea for viewers tuning in to a prime-time soap.
Despite its tragic beginnings, “Desperate Housewives” has always been billed as a comedy, collecting dozens of award nominations over the years in the category. It took only seconds in the pilot to go from dark to darkly funny: The nosy neighbor who discovered Mary Alice’s body screamed, called the police and then after grieving for a few moments, ripped off the “Property of Mary Alice Young” sticker on a borrowed blender.
The scene was a sign of the show’s tone, different from anything else on TV at the time, and viewers took notice. It worked: About 22 million people tuned in to the premiere to see Marcia Cross as Bree Van de Kamp, the uptight, Martha Stewartesque homemaker; Felicity Huffman as Lynette Scavo, the harried executive who stopped climbing the corporate ladder to raise her kids; Eva Longoria as Gabrielle Solis, the former fashion model adjusting to the suburbs; and Teri Hatcher, making her return to TV as Susan Mayer, the klutzy single mom with a disastrous love life.
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