Wisteria Lane rolls up the sidewalks tonight at 8
MICHAEL STOREY
ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE
After eight seasons and 180 episodes, it’s time to bid a fond farewell to the women of Wisteria Lane. Desperate Housewives folds the tents and steals away into the night with a double-episode finale at 8 p.m. today on ABC.
TV seasons are akin to dog years, and eight years is an extremely good run these days. So, good luck to Susan Delfino, Lynette Scavo, Bree Van de Kamp and Gabrielle Solis. May all your desperations be manageable.
How well I recall the media fuss that accompanied Marc Cherry’s creation on its debut Oct. 3, 2004. An impressive 21.6 million viewers tuned in to see what the new show was all about. Before the first season was over, an average of 30 million were watching and Desperate Housewives was TV’S top series.
Out of curiosity, I dug into the archives to see what I had written about the show’s premiere. “Don’t let the sudser title or estrogen-heavy casting put you off,” The TV Column said on the day of the debut. “Male viewers will also enjoy this prime-time soap that pries the rock off idyllic suburbia to see what’s really living underneath.
“Among the desperate housewives are Teri Hatcher ( Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman), Felicity Huffman ( Sports Night), Marcia Cross ( Melrose Place) and Eva Longoria ( The Young and the Restless).”
I then noted that Longoria was the “baby” of the cast at age 29. Hatcher, Huffman and Cross were, respectively, 39, 41 and 43.
“I find it refreshing that a network has populated a series with actresses who weren’t in high school two years ago,” I wrote.
In youth-obsessed Hollywood, where even Longoria was pushing past her prime, the series was the first show in a long time that allowed women in their 40s to be sexy instead of over the hill.
Cherry says the inspiration for his series came when he was watching a trial on TV where a mother was charged with killing her five children. He turned to his mother and asked, “Can you imagine a woman being so desperate that she would hurt her own children?” He said his mom slowly turned to him and said, “I’ve been there.”
The TV Column then went on to preview the debut that same night of Boston Legal.
A couple of months later, I wrote, “Millions of viewers have been caught up in the soapy shenanigans on Wisteria Lane (formerly the Universal Studios backlot street of Beaver Cleaver’s family) and can’t wait for the next exciting episode featuring the four fetching femmes.
“So far, the show has brought us suicide, murder, adultery, drug and alcohol abuse and mystery. What more could a viewer ask for on a Sunday night?”
Another good reason to watch was that the alwaysquerulous Parents Television Council slammed the show as a “smut soap” and made it their cause celebre until the next big thing came along.
We didn’t miss an episode at our house for about four seasons. Then, as happens to many series that hang around long enough, the show bogged down.
Once the darling of magazine covers and chat shows, Desperate Housewives went into a creative slump. The twists and turns became labyrinthine and the plots contrived. For me, the show “jumped the shark” when Wisteria Lane was wiped out by a tornado (Season 4, episode 9).
It didn’t help that the series skipped ahead five years between Seasons 4 and 5. The plot device (which got rid of a gaggle of kiddie actors) smacked of, well, desperation.
There was a creative rebound of sorts, then another stumble in the remaining seasons. Many of the storylines bordered on silly, if not bizarre.
By last season, the former No. 1 show slipped to No. 26 but was still pulling in an impressive 12 million viewers each week.
Cherry, who wrote tonight’s finale, said at the TV critics’ winter press tour that he has had the final episode in his head for more than seven years, and he plans to make a cameo appearance a la Alfred Hitchcock.
He also said there would never be a Desperate Housewives movie. “I’m just never sending these gals to Dubai. That’s all I’m saying,” Cherry said, in a reference to the second (and generally panned) Sex and the
City movie. Cherry also said he “hoped to do something ... that would pay an homage to some of the characters” who are no longer on the show.
So, expect some old familiar faces to put in an appearance tonight. They include James Denton (whose Mike Delfino character was killed off in a drive-by shooting in March) and Dana Delany, who played Katherine Mayfair before she left to star in ABC’S Body of Proof.