What Desperate Housewives (Doesn't) Tell Us About Ourselves

Last night, while watching an episode of Desperate Housewives, in which one character declares war on a nun, another finds out her father is the owner of the local feed store instead of a Merchant Marine, and another is keeping her - retarded? - son locked in the basement for killing a girl, I came to a startling realization: This show is the most unrealistic piece of garbage on television.

And I love it. But that's not the point. The point is, the show is like the Bad Boys 2 of television drama in the 21st century (and easier to watch than Path to 9/11. Zing!). Not in terms of quality but in the sense that they've taken a single plot principle and driven it to its logical extreme.

That principle is this: keep making things worse for the characters involved and you'll have a more interesting show. That's the basic idea behind the writing of these episodes, I'm convinced. Sure, each episode has its own resolutions, but the corny voice-overs always allude to more trouble on the horizon, and that is the driving force behind the show.

They might as well be running over dead bodies or having characters kidnapped and taken to Cuba for the big finale. Even though it's not a bad thing, it is a very contrived thing. Perhaps that's why viewership fell so dramatically from the first season to the second. It was such a "new" idea to certain people, combined with the fact that the schtick involved a bunch of super-MILFs, and they just had to get it out of their systems before moving on.