It started off so well: created by the same producer as Sex And The City, Desperate Housewives promised to be original and captivating. However, the pressures of keeping the public titillated and excited about such a, let us admit it, boring and easily exhaustible subject as suburban married life, season in season out, finally proved too much. The Desperate Housewives went shark-jumping.
First, with the producers having to keep the ratings high and the writing team going through some major writer's blocks, they had to put Mike Delfino in coma. That was the beginning of the end, the show went down the daytime soap opera way. More trite gimmicks followed with hastily contrived and unnaturally ended sub-plots crammed into a very limited episode time frame.
While Sex And The City at least purported realism and natural kind of acting, the way the desperate housewives get lined up in a row to deliver punch lines reeks of As The World Turns and The Days Of Our Lives. Scores of relatives and old time friends conveniently popping out of nowhere and vanishing into nothingness again, story lines cropping up and abruptly getting cut (probably prompted by the actors' raise demands), stock facial expressions and mannerisms - all signs tell of how desperate the production team must be using all the oldest tricks of trade to sustain viewers' interest.
One thing missing from Desperate Housewives now is canned laughter.
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