Desperate Housewives: The Housewives

An Emmy and Golden Globe award-winning American television series of the dramedy genre, created by Marc Cherry, that began airing on October 3, 2004 on ABC. The show takes place on Wisteria Lane in the fictional suburban town of Fairview (license plates in the show are from a fictitious "Eagle State," and E.S. is shown on written addresses). The show is about the lives of four women (seen though the eyes of their dead neighbor), only two of whom are actually housewives as of January 2006. It follows their domestic struggles while several mysteries unfold in the background. Desperate Housewives combines many styles such as: drama, comedy, mystery, thriller, farce, camp, soap opera and satire.

Cherry initially had pitched the series to HBO, CBS, NBC, Fox, Showtime, and Lifetime. ABC was the only network to accept Cherry's offer. The series rocketed to the top of the ratings from the premiere episode. Immediately after, the term "desperate housewives" became a cultural phenomenon. This warranted "real" desperate housewives features in magazines and TV shows such as The Oprah Winfrey Show and The Dr. Phil Show. The show has been credited with reviving ABC's ratings. Later on, Lost and Grey's Anatomy helped further this revival.

Desperate Housewives stars Golden Globe award winning actress Teri Hatcher, Golden Globe award and Emmy award winning actress Felicity Huffman, TV veterans Marcia Cross and Nicollette Sheridan, and rising star Eva Longoria. Since the second pilot episode, Brenda Strong is the current narrator of the series.

The show was a big success of the 2004-2005 television season, and gained much critical acclaim. Its pilot episode which aired in October 2004, gained a stunning 21.3 million viewers making it the best new drama for the year, the highest rated show of the week, and also the best performance by a pilot for ABC, since Spin City in 1996.

Links:

- Official site @ ABC
- Desperatefans.org - One of the biggest postingboards about DH online!

The Housewives

Teri Hatcher - Susan Mayer
Susan is naturally inquisitive and is perhaps the driving force behind the housewives' efforts to discover the truth about Mary Alice Young. She is particularly suspicious of Paul Young. She dislikes Zach Young and worries about the threat he poses to her daughter, describing him as "rampage crazy" (whilst admitting that she herself is "adorable crazy"). Susan is also a neighborhood gossip and busy-body as she hires a private investigator to uncover the dark secrets of the Youngs and Mike Delfino.
She also has a long-running competitiveness with Edie Britt. She discovers that she is the result of her mother's one night stand with the owner of a feed store. When she attempts to make contact with him and tell him who she is, he has a heart attack but survives. She temporarily lived in Bree Van De Kamp's house after her house burned down. However, her house has since been rebuilt.

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Felicity Huffman - Lynette Scavo
Lynette used to be a high-powered advertising executive but now her husband Tom travels almost all the time and her ADHD afflicted boys and infant daughter are driving her crazy. It is as though she took a new job she thought she would love, and now she desperately misses her old one but she is so driven that she tries to apply the same go-getter methods she used at work to being a mom. And it doesn't always work. Worse, Tom seems to have no idea how harried she is. He's oblivious to her plight, and his cluelessness only fuels her frustration. Lynette is fearless and able to say it like it is. When the worlds scariest stay-at-home mother, Maisy Gibbons, insists on a politically correct version of Little Red Riding Hood the impressionable Lynette gives Maisy a talking to, even offering to "throw down" outside. But Lynette, although a toughie, is also an intense overachiever, and in her frenzied attempt to get the costumes made on time, she winds up getting hooked on her sons' ADD medication. The career woman who once had it all begins to unravel, realizing she's not cut out for the life she leads.

Strung out and exhausted, she hallucinates that Mary Alice is offering her a revolver. When she finally calms down, she admits to Bree and Susan, in one of the most moving scenes of the show, that she thinks she's a terrible mother. This admission itself only becomes more painful to Lynette when her friends confess that they too found motherhood challenging. For the first time Lynette realizes that no one has an easy time of motherhood, and she sobs to the girls, "We should tell each other this stuff."

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Marcia Cross - Bree Van de Kamp Hodge
Bree Hodge is a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, conservative Republican, and NRA member who owns four guns. Bree was trapped in a dull marriage with Rex, her fed-up husband, and her rebellious children, Andrew and Danielle. An obsessive perfectionist, Bree tries to show as little emotion as possible. Consequently she has a strained relationship with her family. Bree is recognized by both fans and non-fans of the show by her perfect red hair and fair skin. She is also recognized by all the bright "preppy" clothing she wears, except for when her husband died, when she wore black and had her hair in a bun, a change from her traditional hairstyle, a shoulder-length "flip." She is also the tallest of the female characters on Desperate Housewives.

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Eva Longoria - Gabrielle Solis Marquez
Gabrielle is a very gorgeous model who married Carlos Solis for money, but found satisfaction with John Rowland, her teenage gardener. She questions her relationship with Carlos, commenting once that she loved him and all her teenage fantasies had been fulfilled, yet she still wasn't happy. Gabrielle absolutely despises Carlos' mother, Juanita. The families of Gabrielle and Carlos Solis are from the Mexican city of Guadalajara.
It was recently discovered that Gabrielle is Roman Catholic, and refuses to divorce Carlos because of her faith. She lost the baby after being attacked when her house was broken into. Believing Gabrielle to be in pain from her loss, Carlos sent a former inmate, Hector Ramos, to help her deal with it. Through Hector, Gabrielle began to realize that she was more deeply affected by the loss of the baby than she would at first admit. Her most recent rival is Sister Mary Bernard, a pretty Catholic nun who has apparently caused Carlos to turn over a new leaf, and who Gabrielle fears will eventually persuade Carlos to end the marriage. When she heard that Sister Mary's group was short of the money it needed to send Sister Mary to Botswana as part of a relief effort, Gabrielle personally donated the money, just to ensure that Sister Mary would be out of the way (at least for a while), and lied to the doctors on the medical forms for Carlos' physical evaluation so that he would be forced to stay home with her. Gabrielle also invoked the jealousy of Lynette when she planted a supposedly "friendly" kiss on Tom at a party; Lynette got her revenge by making out with Carlos right in front of Gabrielle.
Gabrielle and Carlos want to have a baby, but cannot since she cannot become pregnant again because of her miscarriage. They try adoption, and are to adopt pole-dancer Libby Collins' daughter (who Gabrielle names "Lily"). Libby changes her mind three times, ultimately taking Lily back; this left Gabrielle heartbroken. The Solises finally decide to make their new maid, Xiao-Mei, the surrogate mother of their baby. The in-vitro fertilization works and Xiao-Mei gets pregnant. In the second season finale, Gabrielle finds out that Carlos is cheating on her with Xiao-Mei. Following this, she surprisingly does not blow up at Carlos; instead, she orders that Xiao-Mei help her throw Carlos's belongings out of the house. In the third season opener, Gabrielle and Carlos are said to be getting a divorce. At Bree's wedding party, Xiao-Mei's water breaks. Xiao-Mei's baby is born black and the doctor reveals that the wrong baby was put in Xiao-Mei, and therefore Gabrielle and Carlos will not have a child. Gabrielle also runs into John Rowland and has sex with him, but only this time John was cheating on his companion. John tells Gabrielle that he can't do this to his fiancée and leaves.
When Gabrielle learns that a woman is trying to kill her husband for cheating on her and holding several people at a supermarket hostage, she tells Carlos that she can relate to that woman, and she tells him that they should end their bitterness towards each other before it gets worse. Carlos agrees. Carlos and Gabrielle get divorced, but are at peace with each other.

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Nicollette Sheridan - Edie Britt
A real estate agent and serial divorcee. Edie is fiercely competitive both romantically and professionally, having declared no other Realtor sells in the neighborhood but herself. It is possible that her name, Britt is a reference to the fact that Nicollette Sheridan is British.
During most of the first season Edie is trying to move in on Mike and she attempts to steal Mike Delfino away from Susan Mayer when not having sex with someone else. In the pilot episode, Martha Huber mentions Edie having a son but he is never seen or mentioned again. Edie began dating Karl Mayer soon after Julie's birthday party. After Susan tells her she has burnt her house down while Edie spreads Martha Huber's ashes, she uses it to join the Housewives club and gets closer to everyone. In the second season of Desperate Housewives, Edie starts dating Susan's ex-husband Karl much to the displeasure of Susan Mayer (Karl's former wife). Karl pretends to break up with Edie and has sex with Susan. Karl admits to Susan that he was still dating Edie and went back to Edie, who never found out. Edie later discovers that Karl had an affair with Susan, and takes revenge by burning down Susan's house. She admits to Susan that she burned down her home and Susan successfully gets proof of this by using a wire. Edie starts to get into a physical fight with Susan over the wire tape, and gets stung by yellowjackets. Susan attempts to make a deal with Edie to try and stop the release of the tape, but Edie refuses. In the third season, Edie's nephew comes to live with her. Susan's daughter and Edie's nephew begin spending time together. During this week's Desperate Housewives, Edie tells Julie Mayer (Susan's daughter) that her nephew is nothing but trouble and that she should stay away from him. Edie, like many other of the Housewives characters, was involved in a hostage situation. However, unlike the other hostages, she made it into a room which she subsequently locked. The hostage taker, named Carolyn, was trying to get kill her husband, who was the other person who made it to that room, for having an affair. Near the end of the hostage situation, Carolyn threatened to shoot Edie after learning that she was in there with her husband, suspecting she was another one of his affairs (even though she wasn't). Although she was dating him as a revenge against Susan and because she loved him, Edie dumps Mike when he is arrested for Monique's murder. She goes on being Julie's alternative for her mother and even gets her the pills which once again sets her at odds with Susan.

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Brenda Strong - Mary Alice Young
Mary Alice is the most mysterious of the housewives because we only know bits and pieces of her story. A loving, doting wife and mother who was generous to her friends, she was the last person any of them expected to shoot herself in the head.
In death, Mary Alice sees things she would not have seen in life: her friends' vulnerabilities, lies and secrets. She doesn't judge them so much as love them more because of their foibles, pitying them for the ways they manipulate and hurt those they care about most. Perhaps because Mary Alice represents a part of them, the women decide to get to the bottom of her suicide. They can't quite make sense of why her husband and son are so odd, or why this vivacious woman had married a man who seems to be withholding and cold. After finding a blackmail note in Mary Alice's clothes, the women make a series of discoveries: She was being treated by Dr. Goldfine; she once went by another name, Angela; and she may have had something to do with a baby that disappeared. When Felicia Tilman comes to town and realizes she knew Mary Alice by her former identity, it's only a matter of time before the women learn just how much Mary Alice may have been hiding.
In the first season's finale, the mystery of Mary Alice's death is revealed. Years ago, Mary-Alice (whose real name is Angela) couldn't conceive. She bought a baby illegally from a heroin addict, Dierdre, and moved to Wisteria Lane with her husband and the new baby to start a new life. The Young family's beautiful, happy life on Wisteria Lane was nearly destroyed when the woman returned, seemingly sober, wanting her baby back. After a verbal fight, as the woman went to reclaim her baby, Mary-Alice stabbed her, killing her, as Dana/Zack watched on. Mary Alice and Paul chopped up the body and buried it under their pool. As fate would have it, Zack's father turned out to be Mike Delfino. Years later, when Mrs. Huber discovered Mary Alice's secret via her sister, Felicia, who worked with "Angela," she blackmailed Mary Alice. In desperation, Mary Alice committed suicide.
In the third season, Lynette Scavo has a series of dreams about the last time she talked to Mary Alice, which happened to be moments before she shot herself. Lynette tormented herself over not trying to save Mary Alice. After a hostage situation in which two people were killed and Lynette was injured, she had one final dream of Mary Alice. This time, however, Lynette tried to prevent something bad from happening by asking to let her help Mary Alice. To which Mary Alice replied that she couldn't, but she could do something. She could enjoy the lovely evening that was at hand. Mary Alice, as the narrator, says that was the last time Lynette would even dream of her, and for her sake, that was a good thing.

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© 2007 Shannon Lewis