newsweekSex and the SuburbsAmerica is feeling 'Desperate.' How did a racy series about
fortysomething housewives take over pop culture—and what took it so
long?
By Marc Peyser and David J. Jefferson
NewsweekNov. 29 issue - Here's a dirty little secret about
entertainment journalism: the writing and interviewing are easy. The
hard part is the photo shoot. And so it was when the ladies of ABC's
"Desperate Housewives" gathered for their NEWSWEEK close-up last week.
Nicollette Sheridan arrived 45 minutes late. Eva Longoria then
insisted she'd stay only for a half hour. Marcia Cross bristled at the
thought of wearing her hair in the trademark flip of her character,
Bree Van De Kamp. The drama! It was almost as juicy as the show
itself, which is saying something considering that "Housewives" is the
juiciest show to hit TV in years. To be fair, the shoot took place at
8 p.m. and the women had worked all day—Sheridan and Teri Hatcher
started at 5 a.m. At one point, the photographer, Nigel Parry, asked
the cast to "vamp it up." Fortunately, these women vamp like most
people breathe. Sheridan immediately grabbed Felicity Huffman's right
breast. Then, Huffman turned to Cross and said, "I hear people are
going into salons to get their hair red like yours." To which Sheridan
retorted: "And their [pubic hair] to match."
Those brackets mean Sheridan said something naughty—let's just say she
wasn't talking about our president. "Sorry, Nigel," said Huffman.
"We're usually worse than this."
Like when they're working from a script. "Desperate Housewives" is
everything you've heard—racy, funny, smart and sexy. It is also
something of a miracle. Not just because, with almost 25 million
viewers every week, it hit the top five faster than any new drama
since "ER" in 1994. "Housewives" is what network television isn't
supposed to be. It's a soap opera in an era when procedural shows like
"CSI" and its clones rule. It's on ABC, a network that hasn't launched
a hit show since the fall of the Berlin wall. (That's only a slight
exaggeration.) Most amazingly, it's a show about housewives—in their
40s! This being Hollywood, these are naturally the hottest housewives
you've ever seen—too hot, perhaps, to judge by last week's hubbub over
a promo Sheridan did with NFL star Terrell Owens, where she seduces
him in a locker room by dropping her towel. ABC quickly apologized for
the "inappropriate" spot, though you wonder how sorry they can be.
Last month's controversy—when advertisers pulled their ads because
they thought the show was too risqué—only made more people desperate
to see "Housewives." "Yeah, I have some women wearing some skimpy
stuff and a gardener that takes off his shirt, but I also know that
I'm well within my rights to do so under the heading of soap opera,"
says Marc Cherry, the show's creator, who is actually a somewhat
conservative, gay Republican. "The stuff that goes on in daytime is
far more racy."
If you're coming this late to the party, you'll need an introduction.
"Housewives" is set on picture-perfect Wisteria Lane—one of the houses
on the set was the home of Ward and June Cleaver—and is populated by a
group of far-from-perfect women. Susan (Hatcher) is a divorced
children's book author and major klutz—she once locked herself out in
the nude, only to be discovered by the hunky neighbor she has a crush
on. Lynette (Huffman) gave up her career to become the mother of four
and is so overwhelmed she's become addicted to their ADD medicine.
Bree (Cross) is the local Martha Stewart, a woman who brings homemade
potpourri to the marriage counselor even though it's her perfectionism
that's driving her husband away. Gabrielle (Longoria) is nouveau
riche, miserable and having an affair with the teenage stud who cuts
her lawn. But don't confuse her with Edie (Sheridan): she's just the
neighborhood slut.
"Housewives" is a soap opera, but it may also be the funniest
non-sitcom ever. Unlike "Dynasty" or "Melrose Place," the humor isn't
just campy. Underneath all those wonderful costumes (or lack thereof)
and winks at soap conventions is a razor-sharp satire of suburbia.
Every neighborhood has its local tramp, the bitter old lady who spies
on people and the mother who can't control her kids. In "Housewives,"
they're all just trampier, nastier or more highly medicated than the
ones on your own street. (Hopefully.) We've all been to a dinner party
where the host drinks too much and starts spilling family secrets.
Here's the "Desperate Housewives" version: Bree's husband gets drunk
and announces that they're in couples therapy. The rest of the guests,
aware of how shattered perfect Bree will be by this revelation, start
divulging their own embarrassing secrets. Susan tells everyone about
being locked out in the nude. Lynette reports that she and her husband
once got thrown out of Disneyland after having sex on Mr. Toad's Wild
Ride (the show keeps the double-entendres coming). Finally, Bree can't
stand it anymore. Only she's incapable of revealing any of her own
flaws, so she borrows one from her husband. "Rex cries after he
ejaculates!" she says. Cross, who before the show had studied to be a
psychologist and is nothing like her character, blanched when she
first read the scene. "Honestly, I was, like, 'I can't say that
line'," she says. "I've got to tell them I can't say that line." But
she did, and with the kind of glee Bree reserves for a perfect
soufflé.
As usual with TV shows this smart, "Housewives" almost never got on
the air. The pilot script was rejected by CBS, NBC, Fox, HBO, Showtime
and Lifetime. "Lifetime turned down a show called 'Desperate
Housewives.' That hurt," says Cherry. One of the problems was that the
show defies categorization. Inside its soapy, satirical and utterly
flawless skin lies a dark soul. "Housewives" opened with the suicide
of one of the women's friends, Mary Alice, who narrates the show from
the grave (a la "The Lovely Bones") and watches as they try to figure
out what drove her to her death. Cherry based the show on his own
mother (still alive, thankfully), an opera singer who gave up her
career to raise her three children, sometimes unhappily. "I wanted to
write something about the choices we make in life and what happens
when that doesn't go well," says Cherry, who named many episodes after
songs by Sondheim, the bard of disappointment. "All these women have
made some kind of choice in their life and are in various stages of
regretting it. That's where the desperation comes from."
Cherry knows plenty about that subject. By the time he sold the
"Housewives" script to ABC, he was $30,000 in debt to his mother and
had to sell his house. He had worked on several sitcoms including
"Golden Girls" (which, if you think about it, is something like
"Desperate Housewives: Miami"), but at 40, he couldn't get work. He
hadn't even had an interview in two years. "I was washed up. People
just weren't excited by my name," Cherry says. "That's one of the
reasons I had to write something really smart." Unfortunately, his
agent kept calling the show a black comedy. "No one wants to do a
black comedy," Cherry says. What's more, he soon discovered she had
been embezzling from him, stealing almost $80,000. "That desperation
you feel permeating the script is pretty real," he says.
Fortunately, Cherry found an equally desperate partner. ABC hasn't
created a real hit comedy or drama this decade, and that's no
exaggeration. The last time one of its scripted shows pulled in the
kind of numbers flocking to "Housewives" was when Michael J. Fox left
"Spin City" in May 2000. But one of the benefits of being in the
basement is that you've got nowhere to go but up. "It's no accident
that ABC, the network that's been in trouble in recent years, was
willing to take a chance on something that fat and happy CBS and NBC
weren't," says Tim Brooks, head of research at Lifetime. "The real
breakthroughs are often rejected around the dial." Among the shows
that were turned down by other networks: "Survivor," "The Sopranos,"
"CSI," "Cops," "Cagney and Lacey," "Three's Company" and "All in the
Family." That's not bad company.
At the rate it's going, "Housewives" could become as big as any of
them. The show is currently No. 2 (behind "CSI") in total viewers,
after only seven episodes. Even more amazing considering the subject
matter, it's also the No. 3 show among men. The fact that at least one
housewife finds herself wearing only a bra and panties every week
might have something to do with that (though Cherry's delicious
writing has attracted a large gay following as well). "I think men
watch it because they see their wives," says Longoria. "Somebody
actually said to me, 'My wife has been all of those characters at one
time. She's a crazy mother and I'm sure she's having an affair'."
Whatever the reasons, the show has become a phenomenon at the water
cooler and beyond. Playboy just launched a search for "disrobed
housewives." Kahlua liqueur has started an ad campaign specifically
targeting the housewife demographic. And of course half of Hollywood
wants to get on the show. The latest is a rumor that Heather Locklear,
whose NBC show "LAX" is struggling, will join the cast. "She can play
my sister," Sheridan said when Cherry told her about the bogus rumor.
"My older sister."
They're not too catty, are they? In fact, when the photo-shoot demons
haven't repossessed their souls, the actresses are remarkably friendly
to each other. Huffman, who is married to actor William H. Macy and
has two children, is very much the mother hen. When she realized the
NEWSWEEK photographers hadn't eaten before the shoot, she ordered up
pizzas for the bunch. (Or maybe she just wanted to be sure they'd
shoot her good side.) Cross, a veteran of "Melrose Place," has taken
to tutoring Longoria in the pitfalls of overnight success. Between
takes of a scene last week, Hatcher and Sheridan were actually hugging
each other. Considering that the women's feuds have become weekly
fodder for the tabloids, these good neighbors are frankly a little
disappointing. "If this were a show about four men, the drama would
not even be a topic of conversation," says Longoria, who, as the
show's newest and arguably sexiest face, has received the brunt of the
gossip. "They said I have a lavish trailer with cashmere seats. There
was one story that said I ran into the street in my lingerie, another
one that I'm anorexic, and then they said I'm bulimic," she says.
"Pick a disease and stick with it!" And don't get the women started on
those stories about their alleged plastic surgeries. OK, do. "Does
anybody honestly think I'd have my nose done before my boobs? For the
record, I've had no surgery except a C-section," says Hatcher, who,
like her character, is a single mom.
In spite of their newfound fame, the housewives insist their real
lives are hardly glamorous. "I'm exhausted, but it's a great job,"
says Hatcher, who's wolfing down a lunch of french fries between
takes. Her eye is swollen from this morning's shoot, when Sheridan
threw some cornstarch in her face as part of a fight scene. This
afternoon, her character gets to change a flat tire. Sheridan has the
easier job: she only has to lean against the car and deliver bitchy
lines like, "I bet you were a cheerleader in high school, weren't
you." Normally, Sheridan wouldn't mind spending the day in a black
slip dress with matching cottontail wrap and three-inch pumps. But
today she's nursing a cold, and she can barely get out her lines
between sneezes. Hatcher starts coughing, too. "Are you all right, you
poor thing?" Sheridan says. "All the women are making each other
sick," a wardrobe assistant whispers later. We assume she means that
in the literal sense.
Considering how quickly "Housewives" has become a sensation, you do
have to wonder: what took so long? Why haven't the networks put
together a decent show about women and their real lives? The audience
is there—women make up 56 percent of TV viewers—yet there's really
only one network drama, "Gilmore Girls," about women who aren't cops
or lawyers. Part of the problem is that women are easy to take for
granted. "People pay lip service to stay-at-home moms, but it's not
really respected," says Huffman, who, not coincidentally, is the only
cast member who's not often recognized on the street. "You say you're
a stay-at-home mom and you can see the life force drain out of people.
They're already bored with you." The assumption has long been that men
won't watch shows about women, while women are happy with a good story
regardless of the cast. "You know you're going to get them anyway, so
you don't need to specialize content for them," says Stacey Lynn
Koerner, director of global research integration for Initiative Media.
"The industry has been very surprised."
Naturally, the What Women Want scripts have already started making the
rounds in Hollywood. There's one about a female sports agent, another
about a female hedge-fund manager—and a truckload of family soaps.
"It's the attack of the clones," says Lifetime's Brooks. The folks at
ABC couldn't be happier. "If they're bad rip-offs, it will be good
news for us," says ABC Entertainment president Stephen McPherson.
"Besides, we're going to be doing 'Desperate Housewives: Miami' and
'Desperate Housewives: New York,' hopefully next season." He's
kidding—we think.
Anyway, what can compete with the reigning queens of prime time? Will
any show be able to top the scene last week where Gabrielle's
suspicious mother-in-law snaps a picture of her and her lawn boy toy
in the sack, only to be run over in the middle of Wisteria Lane by
Bree's drunken son? And it gets only better. Without spilling the
beans too much, we can tell you that this week, the show takes a truly
dark turn. We find out who sent that threatening note—"I know what you
did. It makes me sick. I'm going to tell"—to Mary Alice, and why.
Also, a regular character gets strangled to death in his/her own
kitchen. And the one woman you'd never expect to become a new mother
is contemplating getting pregnant. "We're not negotiating my uterus!"
she tells her baby-hungry man. Let's hope she changes her mind. After
all, a show this delightful should pass on its genes.
) mais bon ...
Seul bémol : son mari qui craque. Je voulais le voir pleurer quand il éjacule 
La guerre des Roses : excellent l'intrigue Bree/Rex, et cela se termine par une nouvelle donne "inattendue" 
