Disparate Housewives

Holy mackeral - talk about jumping the shark!

Sunday marked the official start of the countdown to the end of what looked like the re-juvenation of the brain-dead soap opera with legs when "Desperate Housewives" premiered in 2004.

It's probably deserved. Surely there must be enough of an audience tired of listening to Eva Longoria tell everybody about her sexual prowess with French basketball players or Teri Hatcher telling every intereviewer she can find that she's on the prowl for good meaningful sex.

Sunday's season finale to what was a pretty awful season marked the return of creator Marc Cherry back into an active role which, you would think, would mean a return to what made the show popular in the first place - namely, scheming, conniving, and selfish suburban housewives in action when not engaged in weekly poker matches with each other. Alas, no. What we got was tired "cliffhanger" plots that have been done and overdone for years.

Okay, that's something that a soap opera can get away with. What it can't get away with was when the plot points go so incredibly stupid that even slap-jawed Arkansas trailer park yokels go "Dang, that's really dumb!" Whether they voluntarily go in or not, patients don't get to be dressed up and made up while under restraints at a mental institution. And I can't remember anybody - much less a teenaged girl - who gets bashed to the head with a tire iron, then gets up minutes later to carry on a cohesive argument. Does anybody remember the last killer they have come across who droops a jacket over the victim's face? And how come all year police nationwide were on the look-out for the killer's brother (who was also the victim's boyfriend for chrissake!) given this rather intriguing piece of evidence?

And what in blazes have they done to Felicity Huffman? She had the best character and was the glue of the show (in other words, the only one of the cast who can remotely act.) She finds out her husband had an out-of-wedlock child so she exercises "restraint" by figuring out how to pay off the mother? The Season 1 character would have harrassed that mother every step of the way to the bus station!

Maybe they should just hire Ted McGinley to help give it a peaceful death. Without "Grey's Anatomy" as one bookend and Ty Pennington's home renovation show runnning out of weepers and ways to make Sears appliances look appealing, this show is heading for an ugly decline.

Articles:

"Eva Longoria Opens Up About her Lovelife" [Yahoo! News]
"Teri Hatcher Eager to Have Sex" [Softpedia.com]

TAGS: Hatcher Desperate Housewives Huffman Langoria Marc Cherry